A falacy here is there are commercial just-crud apps. There are not. If it is just crud then just rails scaffold it, and estimate day 1 day.
We could be better and more like the subset of real infrastructure projects that are on time and budget. There is probably a subset of software that is too. You need to a great waterfall. Probably allow prototypes that can be thrown away and have a decent budget for the design phase that will shore up the design and therefore the estimate. And have developers on one project.
Hire project managers that are on their 15th ERP build and making a similar one for you. And use last decades tech so there are less uncertainties (probably not a bad idea for many things - gimme that winforms app without all the slower SPA spinners!)
Even with all this what software lacks is classic Engineering (long degree, good concepts taught, respectable education over leetcode practice and so on). Problem is California will piss all over your business with move fast attitude unless you are boring enough to be off their radar.
This is exactly my problem with software dev. There are no standards, no expectations, hardly any regulation. Employers grab fresh graduates and throw them right in the deep end and hardly anyone looks at their work or teaches them anything.
In Norway if you want to be a carpenter or plumber or electrician you have to be an apprentice for two years after your education and then do a test to prove you've learned to do your work properly.
Meanwhile in our field nobody even agrees what properly is, most of us are just here for the money and are planning to job hop in a year so they don't give a crap. Docs? Nah. Unit testing? Nah. Clean code? Nah. That only matters if you give a shit.
We could be better and more like the subset of real infrastructure projects that are on time and budget. There is probably a subset of software that is too. You need to a great waterfall. Probably allow prototypes that can be thrown away and have a decent budget for the design phase that will shore up the design and therefore the estimate. And have developers on one project.
Hire project managers that are on their 15th ERP build and making a similar one for you. And use last decades tech so there are less uncertainties (probably not a bad idea for many things - gimme that winforms app without all the slower SPA spinners!)
Even with all this what software lacks is classic Engineering (long degree, good concepts taught, respectable education over leetcode practice and so on). Problem is California will piss all over your business with move fast attitude unless you are boring enough to be off their radar.
Be boring!