# What If Other Engineers Used Software Methodologies?

*June 15, 2025*

Can you imagine if other engineering disciplines used the same development methodologies as software engineering?

**Civil engineering, but Agile.** "We're going to build this bridge in two-week sprints. At the end of Sprint 1 we'll have a walkable MVP — just two planks and a rope. We'll iterate from there based on user feedback." The bridge collapses. "We'll address that in the retro."

**Mechanical engineering, but with hotfixes.** A car rolls off the assembly line missing a brake pad. "Ship it. We'll push a hotfix to production tonight." The mechanic patches the brake pad on at 2 AM in the customer's driveway while they sleep. Nobody files an incident report.

**Aerospace engineering, but with "move fast and break things."** "We know the left wing isn't fully attached but we need to hit our Q3 launch target. We'll fix it in v1.1." There is no v1.1.

**Structural engineering, but with technical debt.** "Yeah, the foundation is held together with duct tape and prayers, but we'll refactor it next quarter." Next quarter: "We don't have capacity to refactor the foundation. Let's just add another floor on top."

**Electrical engineering, but with Stack Overflow.** "I don't know how to wire this substation, but I found a seven-year-old answer with three upvotes. Let's go with that."

**Nuclear engineering, but with CI/CD.** Every commit to the reactor's control system automatically deploys to production. The test suite is two unit tests, both of which are skipped. Green pipeline.

**Biomedical engineering, but with A/B testing.** "Half the patients get the working pacemaker. The other half get the experimental one we wrote in Rust over the weekend. We'll compare outcomes in 30 days."

The fact that software engineering gets away with this stuff is either a testament to how forgiving software is, or how terrifying our industry should be to everyone else.

Probably both.

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