Refuelling a nuclear aircraft carrier may be a complex operation but it's one for which the plan was already developed quite some time ago.
To compare to software development is missing the point. Building a PC, installing Windows and all the apps you need might take half a day if you're experienced, and it'll take half a day each and every time: it's labour and you can't reduce the time taken to zero. That's like refuelling an aircraft carrier: executing a plan.
But software development isn't like manual labour where you execute a pre-determined plan. It's more like researching how to build the aircraft carrier. Once the plan (the software) is built, installing and executing it is trivial and takes very predictable amounts of time, which means software developers are almost always doing "research" even if it doesn't seem that way.
How long did the first nuclear aircraft carrier take to design? Well, literally the first sentence of the Design section of the wiki article for USS Enterprise says:
Enterprise was intended as the first of a class of six carriers, but massive increases in construction costs led to the remaining vessels being cancelled
So I guess ship designers suck at estimating about as much as software developers do.
Refuelling a nuclear aircraft carrier may be a complex operation but it's one for which the plan was already developed quite some time ago.
To compare to software development is missing the point. Building a PC, installing Windows and all the apps you need might take half a day if you're experienced, and it'll take half a day each and every time: it's labour and you can't reduce the time taken to zero. That's like refuelling an aircraft carrier: executing a plan.
But software development isn't like manual labour where you execute a pre-determined plan. It's more like researching how to build the aircraft carrier. Once the plan (the software) is built, installing and executing it is trivial and takes very predictable amounts of time, which means software developers are almost always doing "research" even if it doesn't seem that way.
How long did the first nuclear aircraft carrier take to design? Well, literally the first sentence of the Design section of the wiki article for USS Enterprise says:
Enterprise was intended as the first of a class of six carriers, but massive increases in construction costs led to the remaining vessels being cancelled
So I guess ship designers suck at estimating about as much as software developers do.