Why do we use the term “farm” so frequently in IT?  Web-farm, Server-farm, ...  As defined by Wikipedia:

“A farm is an area of land, including various structures, devoted primarily to the practice of producing and managing food (produce, grains, or livestock), fibres and, increasingly, fuel…Traditionally, the goal of farming was to work collectively as a community to grow and harvest crops that could be grown in mass such as wheat, corn, squash, and other cash crops. ”

“A factory (previously manufactory) or manufacturing plant is an industrial building where laborers manufacture goods or supervise machines processing one product into another.”

For servers and most app dev shops, it is obvious the term fits: not farm, but factory.  They are server factories or application factories.

However – ‘cubical farm’  seems right; employees are the cattle herded into groups to harvest their surplus value.

So is software development a farm or a factory?  What are the results when you try to run a farm as a factory?  What if the beans or corn are experiencing slower/faster growth than planned?  Can a factory be ran using farming practices?  Would you rather work for a farmer or a factory supervisor?

Thank You for listening.