What is the difference between sketch and blueprint?

Question

When people use these two words in industry , what are the differences?

Answer 1

I don't recognize sketch or blueprint to have any universally accepted meanings in the world of software, but my personal general interpretation is that a sketch is a very rough draft specification or piece of pseudocode and a blueprint is a more formal, fleshed-out specification.

See also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2257086/how-do-you-design-sketch-and-blueprint-a-complicated-piece-of-software-what-ar.

Answer 2

You can build a complete system from its blueprints. You can almost never do so with just a sketch.

Answer 3

As with most words, they mean whatever the presenter wants them to mean :-)

But in terms of architecture (building, not IT), sketches are a lot less formal than blueprints, meant only to give a general indication of layout.

Blueprints are more a technical document, drawn properly to scale and able to be used by builders to craft the final product.

Aside: I happen to know this since we're currently extending the house and builders will openly deride you if you show them nothing more than sketches. What I don't know is why an extension costs three times as much as my entire first house cost me a little over a decade ago, that's what's got me baffled :-)