To outsiders, software development appears to have more to do with engineering than it does with inventing. It does, however, correspond to inventing in a number of ways. In the process of invention, one never knows in advance precisely what is going to happen.

The designers and programmers who write new software must conceive of solutions for the problems that are set before them. Regardless of the many methods and prescriptions for work, writing programming code remains largely new and therefore largely uncertain. Programmers can choose their solutions out of millions of possibilities that are written in dozens of programming languages, and which operate according to thousands of hardware configurations and in dozens of software platforms. Although this freedom does offer a number of advantages, it also makes the project more difficult to manage than traditional projects (e.g. construction or building projects).