Why Software Engineering is still an art

Software engineering isn't yet a science.  In science, you have a bunch of experimental procedures that one can describe, and processes that one can follow, and hopefully two people can reproduce the same result (unless of course we are talking about medical research experiments ;-( ).

Today, I wanted to add some processes to my build.  I'm using Maven (3.6.0), with Open JDK 11.0.2.  I wanted to run some tests over my code to evaluate quality.  Three hours later, and I'm still dealing with all the weirdness.

1. rest-assured (a testing framework) uses an older version of JAXB because it doesn't want to force people to move to JDK 8 or later.
2.  JAXB 2.22 isn't compatible with some of the tools I'm using (AOP and related) in Spring-Boot and elsewhere.
3. I have an extra spring-boot starter dependency I can get rid of because I don't need it, and won't ever use it.  It got there because I was following someone else's template (it's gone now).
4. FindBugs was replaced with SpotBugs (gotta check the dates on my references), so I wasted an hour on a tool that's no longer supported.
5. To generate my code quality reports, I have to go clean up some javadoc in code I'm still refactoring.  I could probably just figure out how to run the quality reports in standalone, but I actually want the whole reporting pipeline to work in CI/CD (which BTW, is Linux based, even though I develop on Windoze).
6. The maven javadoc plugin with JDK 11 doesn't work on some versions, but if I upgrade to the latest, maybe it will work, because a bug fix was backported to JDK 11.0.3
7. And even then, the modules change still needs a couple of workarounds.

In the summers during college, I worked in construction with my father.  Imagine, if in building the forms for the fountain in the center of the lobby (pictured to the right), I could only get rebar from one particular suppler that would work with the holes in the forms.  And to drill the holes, I had to go to the hardware store to purchase a special brand of drill.  Which I would then buy an adapter for, and take part of it apart in a way that was documented by one guy somebody on the job-site knew, so that I could install the adapter to use the special drill bit.  And then we had to order our concrete in a special mix from someone who had lime that was recently mined from one particular site, because the previous batch had some weird contaminates that would only affect our job site.

Yeah, that's not what I had to do, and it came out great.

Yet, that's basically exactly what I feel like I'm doing some days when I'm NOT writing code.  We've got tools to run tools to build tools to build components to build systems that can be combined in ways that can do astonishing stuff.  But, building it isn't yet a science.

Why is this so hard?  Why can't we apply the same techniques that were used in manufacturing (Toyota was cited)?  As a friend of mine once said.  In software, there's simply more moving parts (more than a billion).  That's about a handful of magnitudes more.

   Keith