And academics

It is not only the sales and marketing departments that are to blame, after all where do they find the latest bandwagons to jump on? Amazingly, some of the major culprits are academics - the fact is that there is very little that is really new in software development. I do not suppose that there would be too many research grant to look at 'testing dot net systems', or 'software version control in a distributed environment'. The fact is software development suffers from two major problems in its relationship with academia. Firstly, no one has really defined what it is, is it mathematics, engineering, or logic? The nearest definition is by Fred Brooks who called it' an alien environment' in his famous book 'The Mythical Man Month, and anyone in the commercial environment will appreciate this definition when they are trying, for the nth time, to explain to a senior manager from another area just why his 'small' request is going to take 'forever'.

Secondly, software development is still relatively new and therefore no one really knows how to deal with it yet, there is no expectation that research into 'the works of Francis Bacon' in the English department of a university would impact how journalists perform their day to day tasks; this same expectation does not hold with the; computer science, or information technology, or computing, or data processing, or electronic data processing , or systems .......... research, or whatever today's name is for the area we all work(ed) in. In fact my job title has changed so many times in the past that I sometimes felt like I was on the FBI's witness protection program!