One man's quest for the state of software engineering's practice

Reviewer: Larry Bernstein

Robert Glass reminds us that it is not easy to understand the software state of the practice. He summarizes the analysis that was contained in the IEEE Software magazine from November/December 2003 that reported 88 percent of projects practiced design reviews and 79 percent practiced code reviews. He invited us to go back to that 2003 issue. I did. As Robert Glass suggests, the studies should be redone now. Is open source widely practiced__?__ Is security provided for__?__ Are software systems becoming trustworthy__?__ When we restudy current practices, let's not forget fundamental ones. Do software projects hold structured periodic project meetings__?__ Do they write progress reports__?__ Do they assign and track action items__?__ Do they track customer-reported problems and their solutions__?__ Do they plan with Gantt charts__?__ I think we would all guess that the answer to these questions is obviously yes, but we need the data to be sure. The article is easy to read, as you would expect. It contains useful data and opens your mind to an examination of the common sense of software development. It is a short, yet powerful read. Don't miss it. Online Computing Reviews Service