Déjà Vu: The Life of Software Engineering Ideas

The story of software engineering since the label came into use is thus a story of compromise among generality and specificity, heuristics and formalism, procedures and data, sequence and cycle. The practical response was combination and accommodation-covering all bases or splitting the difference, synthesizing complementary approaches or accommodating inescapable trade-offs. Pragmatists argued for mixed strategies of testing and proving, the use of tailored reliability models and development environments, the use of a full set of metrics, and the synthesis of life-cycle models. But while seizing the middle ground appeared to be a practical way to cope with difficulties, it seemed unlikely to produce a revolution. If software technologists are nowadays devoting more effort to engaging in a pragmatic fashion with the complexity of their problems, it is to their credit. That is symptomatic of maturity and of real engineering.