Alistair Cockburn on what engineering has in common with manufacturing

I've heard a lot of people talk about this topic recently, this article from Alistair Cockburn seems particularly well thought out and reasoned.

What engineering has in common with manufacturing and why it matters - AC

I certainly buy the idea of looking for the bottlenecks - in fact when I'm being an iteration manager this is often what I'm doing. Do we have enough story backlog? Are the developers finishing the stories quickly enough? Are the Business signing stories off? etc. etc.

That said I'm still not convinced bespoke (Agile) software development is 'like' manufacturing - especially when you look at the much longer lifecycle of product a typical manufacturing production line is set up to service. For example when we buy a car we are (usually) buying something that has been researched, designed and developed over a period of years - often including the provision and tooling of a multi-million pound production line. While we can customize some aspects (fabric, paint, engine size) the core of the car remains the same.

Anyway it's interesting to see the different levels of abstraction people are trying to use in order to map the concept of (lean) manufacturing onto the software development, some more successfully than others.