A passenger aircraft is composed of several millions of parts and requires thous

Question

A passenger aircraft is composed of several millions of parts and requires thousands of persons to assemble. A four-lane highway bridge is another example of complexity. The first version of Word for Windows, a word processor released by Microsoft in 1989, required 55 person-years, resulted into 249,000 lines of source code, and was delivered 4 years late. Aircraft and highway bridges are usually delivered on time and within budget, whereas software is often not. Discuss what are, in your opinion, the differences between developing an aircraft, a bridge, and a word processor that would cause this situation.

Explanation / Answer

•Engineers use actual data from previously built bridges and aircrafts to build new ones. This makes their job easy as compared to Microsoft Word Processor which was an innovative piece of software at that time.

•Bridges and aircrafts are usually built over the previous ones, with some improvements and refinements. They do not have to be designed from the scratch usually and the effort put is usually minimum.

•Bridges and aircraft are also fined with severe penalities when delivered late which drives engineeers to do the task early/on time.

•It is not the case that bridges and aircrafts are always delivered on time, they are also delivered late.

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