I was glancing through one of the LinkedIn software group discussions, and noticed that the poor state of software development was being discussed. Whenever I hear these laments, the question that comes to my mind is, “compared to what?”

It isn’t obvious that software development is in much poorer shape than, say, civil or mechanical engineering, and I’m not even sure how to make a meaningful comparison. Consider IEEE’s Risk Factor blog. Yes, expensive software failures are still a too-common occurrence. Yet, as I write this, the second Risk Factor post from the top discusses the fatal Washington DC subway crash in 2009 which was due to an electrical circuit failure, not a software defect. While the field of software should always strive for perfection, it isn’t a realistic standard to be judged against and found wanting.

As an aside, here’s a study I’ve always wanted to do: compare cost and schedule overruns for government IT projects versus government construction projects of similar initial budget and schedule projections. The raw data should be publicly available, assuming one knows where to look. Comparing how well the projects met their requirements across the domains would be more challenging.

 

 

 

Here’s a thought experiment: what if empirical software engineering papers were first reviewed with the results redacted? Once the reviewers had submitted the reviews of the redacted paper, they were then shown the full paper and did a full review. I wonder how much the final reviews would change in practice.

Ian Sommerville went on a tear the other day about IEEE not supporting open access content. I suspect that IEEE uses the revenues it gets from publication subscriptions to subsidize other activities like conferences. I think the open access model for research publications is inevitable, especially in tech-savvy fields like electrical engineering and computer science. When that happens,  the IEEE may find itself in the position that the newspapers did when one of their profit centers (classifieds) got disrupted by free online services like Craigslist, making it difficult to fund the cost centers (news reporting).

Mind you, if free journals and fewer subsidized IEEE conferences means that computer science shifts from being conference-oriented to being journal-oriented like the rest of academia, it will probably be a benefit to the CS research community. But IEEE will have to either reinvent itself or go the way of the local newspaper.