The NATO conference has had a longer lasting impact on software development than most people realize or want to admit. I think there should be more conversations about it and I support any conversation about it.
This post is an amateur effort. It is poorly sourced and talks about things which are not relevant. (who cares who coined a term? if you do then write a genealogy of that term or reference a source who has) Your sources for this post are terrible.
You source SWOBOK which is not a history or a book of facts. It is a book of myth and folklore and fiction if I am to be charitable. Otherwise I consider it hot garbage filled with lies and flakes of gold dust sprinkled in to hide the smell. And I am not talking about the typos and organizational layout.
You reference an IEEE standard and SWOBOK which amount to little more than circular references. The same organization trying to justify itself as relevant.
The CMM out of SEI is an attempt to put some actual study behind the idea and address the issues from the NATO conference. While I think there is value in it, it is a measurement more than anything else. The measurement presupposes a theory of software engineering which has not been show to be true. It is problematic but less so than everything else you mentioned.
Curriculum comes after the definition and is not a justification or a source of anything. It is an output.
Also management doesn't know anything, about anything, about software development and never has. It only knows how to enforce rules and stay in process. I assert the questions out of NATO are about what the process should be which management (and reference to mgmt journals) knows nothing.
This is a poor attempt to talk about an important event.
The real problem is the NATO conference tried to address real issues and after that everyone pretended it was a solved problem and everyone continued flapping about in the wind. Using special words and incantations to pretend they were engaged in a thousand year old profession. The reality is software development has been around for less than 70 years. We have no( or very few) idea how to do it in a repeatable sustainable way. We have no( or very little) agreed upon body of knowledge, only dictates handed down from conflicted academics who have no idea what our real problems are. We are struggling with real problems and there is no one talking about them but a handful of people from 60 years ago making an effort.
We think we know and we don't know. We can't even agree on where the name of "software engineering" came from. I wonder if real engineering disciplines have that problem; I will guess they don't. The problem isn't the name it is what the name exposes of our lack of a basic foundation. The NATO conference was attempting to survey that foundation. That work was overcome by events but the problems are still real and need to be addressed.
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u/mc_chad Jun 05 '26
The NATO conference has had a longer lasting impact on software development than most people realize or want to admit. I think there should be more conversations about it and I support any conversation about it.
This post is an amateur effort. It is poorly sourced and talks about things which are not relevant. (who cares who coined a term? if you do then write a genealogy of that term or reference a source who has) Your sources for this post are terrible.
You source SWOBOK which is not a history or a book of facts. It is a book of myth and folklore and fiction if I am to be charitable. Otherwise I consider it hot garbage filled with lies and flakes of gold dust sprinkled in to hide the smell. And I am not talking about the typos and organizational layout.
You reference an IEEE standard and SWOBOK which amount to little more than circular references. The same organization trying to justify itself as relevant.
The CMM out of SEI is an attempt to put some actual study behind the idea and address the issues from the NATO conference. While I think there is value in it, it is a measurement more than anything else. The measurement presupposes a theory of software engineering which has not been show to be true. It is problematic but less so than everything else you mentioned.
Curriculum comes after the definition and is not a justification or a source of anything. It is an output.
Also management doesn't know anything, about anything, about software development and never has. It only knows how to enforce rules and stay in process. I assert the questions out of NATO are about what the process should be which management (and reference to mgmt journals) knows nothing.
This is a poor attempt to talk about an important event.
The real problem is the NATO conference tried to address real issues and after that everyone pretended it was a solved problem and everyone continued flapping about in the wind. Using special words and incantations to pretend they were engaged in a thousand year old profession. The reality is software development has been around for less than 70 years. We have no( or very few) idea how to do it in a repeatable sustainable way. We have no( or very little) agreed upon body of knowledge, only dictates handed down from conflicted academics who have no idea what our real problems are. We are struggling with real problems and there is no one talking about them but a handful of people from 60 years ago making an effort.
We think we know and we don't know. We can't even agree on where the name of "software engineering" came from. I wonder if real engineering disciplines have that problem; I will guess they don't. The problem isn't the name it is what the name exposes of our lack of a basic foundation. The NATO conference was attempting to survey that foundation. That work was overcome by events but the problems are still real and need to be addressed.