Application development as an engineering discipline: Revolution or evolution?

The title question is answered differently according to the nature of the person being asked. A talented person with a new solution to a particular problem in the existing technology may be a revolutionary, gathering devoted followers who spread the new idea. Such leaders and their followers then propagate paradigm shifts promoting the one answer, the “silver bullet” to solve all problems. When we look more closely, in most cases only a single aspect was solved; we were not given a whole new way to develop software. This confirms the position of the traditionalists, who continue to keep and protect what is well known. In the end, in application development as in any other discipline, evolution is driven by new inventions and kept on track by the conservatives among us. This essay reflects on the historical path of software development toward an engineering discipline. It also introduces the papers collected for this theme on application development, which demonstrate this progress in selected areas.