Eras of Software Engineering Technology Transfer

This chapter talks about the eras of technology transfer: rational era, empirical era, and back-to-basics era. Any Fortran programmer of the 1960s quickly saw that it was more efficient and reliable to call a built-in sine function than to write one from scratch. This was a rational approach. In the late 1980s, people began to preach that before adopting any ?>new?> method or tool, one must first measure its effect. Before a method X is introduced into the process, a statistical baseline for the current performance must be determined, then X is used, and then another statistical analysis should be done to compare the ?>before?> and ?>after?>. This was the empirical approach. It is predicted that software engineering will soon move toward a synthesis of rationalism and empiricism. This will happen in the back-to-basic era, and could be guided by tenets.