Why Software Development Is More Like Cooking Than Manufacturing

What is the software production process? Requirements gathering, analysis, design, development, testing, packaging, release—are these the software manufacturing steps?

It seems reasonable; isn’t that just creating software from nothing? Let’s compare it with the image below: the differences between a car’s manufacturing process and a software’s production process.

On a car assembly line, workers repeatedly produce identical products according to a fixed procedure; each car in the same batch is the same. For software, producing the same product reduces to copy‑and‑paste. What we call the software production process actually corresponds to the design phase of a prototype, because each iteration results in a different version.

Thus, software development is perpetually in a design phase and never enters a production phase akin to traditional manufacturing. The classic waterfall model attempts to manage a constantly changing design by applying repetitive production management methods, which is inherently unsuitable.

If the car assembly line analogy is unfamiliar, consider a cooking example. To make tomato‑egg stir‑fry, the standard steps are: scramble the eggs, set aside, add oil, add scallions, add tomatoes, add sugar, return the eggs, add salt, and serve. Anyone with basic training can replicate this dish. However, if you have already added sugar and the customer says they are diabetic, you must discard the tomatoes; at least the cooked eggs remain usable. Or a customer orders tomato‑egg stir‑fry but then complains they wanted cucumber‑egg stir‑fry. Would a chef confront them with a knife? In reality, software development is far more complex; tearing down and rebuilding is commonplace, and users often cannot distinguish between tomatoes and cucumbers, sometimes demanding cucumber taste like tomato. This explains why programmers sometimes clash with product managers.

This reflects the inherent nature of software development: it is neither a pure science nor an engineering discipline, because science and engineering rely on solved problems as reusable knowledge. Software development resembles cooking; even the most experienced chef must redo each dish, and a detailed recipe cannot guarantee identical flavor, as environment, timing, ingredients, and the chef’s mood all affect the result. Worse, while cooking ingredients and steps are visible, the software development process is invisible; we only see designers writing recipes and programmers tossing code into the pot, seemingly unrelated to the final dish.

Remember this: software development’s essence is perpetual design; any attempt to constrain it with fixed plans or replace developers’ autonomy and creativity with code workers and rigid processes is doomed to fail. As Lu Yuan said, every chef is a designer.

My point is: programmers who cannot cook are not good designers… but at least we are all designers, not mere code workers.

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