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Having just returned from vacation in Italy, I felt inspired to write about the parallels between cathedrals and software. Who knows; perhaps in the future people will look back on today’s custom software applications with the same admiration that I had for the Duomo in Florence. Here was a project that lasted hundreds of years, give or take a few dozen years if you count the gaps when funding ran out (sound familiar?). For a project of that duration, turnover was of course an issue; each time, the new project manager had their own ideas, often meaning that some of the previous team’s work had to be redone. But what struck me most of all was that the original design for the building called for an impossibly large dome; it was assumed that when it came time to add the dome, the necessary technology would have been developed. Talk about a risk item!