Everyone has heard the old adage "measure twice, cut once" yet it can be so difficult to get a team to adopt this mentality when it comes to writing code (cough cough... unit tests...). Software may not be quite as tangible as a bridge or an airplane, therefore it can be easy to dismiss the fields of structural/mechanical and software engineering as having little to nothing in common. However, many of the foundations of Agile stem from the manufacturing industry, and the co-creator of Scrum Jeff Sutherland writes of how applying Scrum to a construction project can greatly reduce the overall project time and improve quality. In reality, all of these fields are about buidling, maintaining and improving things and thus they have a lot more in common than you would expect.

During this presentation I'll share some of the lessons that I learned growing up building houses, and high-performance race cars with a father who is a bit of a perfectionist and we'll explore how many of those lessons can help improve how we approach software development. We'll also briefly discuss why some other industries could gain a lot from adopting some common software practices.