On June 1st, Dr. Ivar Jacobson delivered a keynote address at the annual International Conference on Software Engineering. Ivar shared his views on the history of software engineering to date and where we need to go from here.
This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, maybe it is the end of the beginning” Winston Churchill
We are more than 20 million software developers on the planet, with a large number of methods to develop software. However, the most successful recipe for success is a method that focuses on hiring the most brilliant people in the world and empowering them to create wonders. 50 years ago, Ericsson in Sweden did that. Now Apple, Google, Amazon, etc. do that.
What about the rest of the world? – banks, insurance, airlines, defense, telecom, automotive, etc. How can we get these industries to be more innovative and develop better software, faster, cheaper and with happier customers? How can we do that given that the state of the art of our discipline is in such a chaos, characterized by the multitude of competing methods out there?
It starts with education, but it doesn’t end there. It goes on to dramatically change the way we work with methods, how we teach, learn, change, and in particular use them. I will introduce Essence: a new way of thinking that promises many things, never before known to software engineering, but already being adopted by for instance Scrum.
Here are some comments and reviews of Ivar’s talk