1968: A Software Engineering Odyssey

It’s over half a century since the NATO Software Engineering conference in Garmisch. We like to think of software development as having matured and followed an ever upward progression, but the truth is less tidy. What have we learned? What have we forgotten? What do we keep relearning? What is it that holds us back? What can we see and foresee? If we care for the future, we must learn from the past and observe trends in the present.

Target Audience: Architects, Developers, Technology Managers
Prerequisites: Software engineering practices
Level: Practicing

Extended Abstract
It’s over half a century since the NATO Software Engineering conference in Garmisch. We like to think of software development as having matured and followed an ever upward progression, but the truth is less tidy. What have we learned? What have we forgotten? What do we keep relearning? What is it that holds us back? What can we see and foresee?
Progress in hardware has surpassed our expectations, giving us a global online culture, ever bigger data and access to all of this in the palm of our hand. But what of our programming languages and paradigms? Our practices? We see engineering discipline in deployment pipelines, but what of the whole system? The AI dream woke up in another bed. And we have learned without doubt that humans form part of the systems they create, with ethical consequences.
If we care for the future, we must learn from the past and observe trends in the present.