Craft software that makes people feel something

In the best case scenario, professionally writing software is treated like a craft. You produce something useful while applying your skills, with the tools at your disposal. You can write software as an art form, just like woodworking can be both a craft and an art form. A woodworker in an assembly line doing the same thing over and over again to me is not a craftsperson, it is the attitude towards the job that makes it art, craft, or assembly line work.

Too many software projects treat programmers as factory workers, where their primary value is measured in amount of storypoints or Jira tickets finished. Don't get me wrong, you can be a craftsperson and use an issue tracker ofcourse, but if quantity is the only thing management cares about instead of quality, the craft gets lost in the process. Quantity is easy to measure, quality is not.

At the same time treating software like an art is probably not very useful. That code is (typically) not written to be looked at, but to make the computer do something useful.

It's a shame artisinal software sounds so weird, because that precisely describes the level of caring I'd like to see applied to the software I use.

> At the same time treating software like an art is probably not very useful. That code is (typically) not written to be looked at, but to make the computer do something useful.

FWIW you can argue the same for woodworking, a chair is typically not made to be looked at but for people to sit on. I tired to think what inherently makes writing software treated less than a craft than woodworking, but couldn’t think of any.