Are web based applications the future of structural engineering software?

The BuildUp - May 2021

Structural engineering software is the rare software product where maturity is the selling point. Many of the most popular structural engineering software products on the market today are still running lines of code written well into the last century. It is not an industry that welcomes change, perhaps even one that fears it, and yet something is quietly stirring. A new generation of engineers are coming of age and they are looking to do things differently.

Where are we now?

Currently structural engineering software is delivered overwhelmingly through desktop applications. The following results are from a poll conducted by the Buildup report.

Figure 1 Engineer platform preference for structural engineering software (N=1,180)

By a significant margin, the platform of choice for many structural engineers remains the desktop. And while a significant portion appear to use some web based applications, very few engineers have completely shifted online.

This is somewhat surprising given the pace of advance in web technologies versus the relative stasis of desktop technologies. From ever evolving frameworks to advances in data analysis and the cloud computing revolution, the web provides software developers with a suite of tools that the desktop development environment simply has not matched. 

And yet structural engineers choose to wait hours every month for new versions of software to be installed on their desktop, and confine themselves to a single operating system. For all the talk of artificial intelligence, blockchain and 3D printing touted in industry talks, structural engineering appears to have not yet discovered the Internet.

How did we get here?

There are a number of intersecting forces that likely explain the current state of desktop dominance in structural engineering software. 

The first is that web development is a relatively recent phenomenon when compared to desktop development. Structural engineering applications are computationally expensive, requiring heavy mathematical calculation. It’s only really become possible to run complex web apps that can perform these calculations in a reasonable timeframe in the last decade or so. 

This couples with the fact that structural engineering software is itself complex software to both learn and develop. Consider that the end-users for this software typically require at minimum a bachelor’s degree to start learning how to use it, and that learning process can take months if not years.

Figure 2 - Time required to learn a new piece of structural engineering software (N=438)

39% of the structural engineers polled by the BuildUp responded that it takes longer than three months to learn a particular structural program. It’s reasonable to think that engineers would be more willing to invest that time in software that has a long track record of results. Given the relative age of desktop development and the importance of accurate results it is unsurprising that most engineers continue to use desktop applications. 

Where are we going?

Given the immense head start of desktop applications it may seem likely they will continue their dominance. However there are a couple of telltale signs that indicate that attitudes may be changing. 

Figure 3 - How structural engineers learn new structural engineering software (N=420)

When the BuildUp polled structural engineers on how they learn new structural engineering software, we found some very interesting results.

They showed that six times the number of engineers trust online resources over product documentation to learn a new program. This is surprising as for most software the product manual is single source of truth. It suggests that the sources of information trusted by structural engineers trust has drastically changed. And it would unsurprising to us to see that trust slide over into performing those newly learnt calculations on the web.

These results also illustrate the weaknesses of the current paradigm. The results above indicate that one in five engineers are so dissatisfied with the learning guides produced by established software providers that they have resorted to learning complex software through trial and error. This is a tinderbox waiting to be lit. 

So while we can’t predict the future, there are tentative signs that web based structural engineering applications may well be on the rise. All we’ll say is: watch this space.