Is IT Falling Short of Business Expectations?

This papers complements what DeMarco said. Software should be used - developped - to do things companies are not doing.

Quoting: "...the most financially successful companies are doing things that others aren't doing. Notably, successful companies are working together with their IT organizations to develop new products and IT is used to help support business growth." 

Forrester CEO: Facebook is toast

Colony(Forrester CEO) insisted that the old PC model is dead and more controversiallythat the Cloud Computing model was also dead because it “doesn’t leverage powerin your pocket”. Future architecture will marry powerful data capabilities,held in the Cloud, with powerful apps on personal devices, he said.

A Fundamental Duality of Software Engineering

"Once more, as elsewhere in computer science, abstraction is the key to solid results that stand the test of time".

Fighting Complexity

Getting rid of complexity is the theme of Dr. Neumann research in computers and network security.  See Killing the Computer to Save It

"... the insight that “complex systems break in complex ways” — that the increasing complexity of modern hardware and software has made it virtually impossible to identify the flaws and vulnerabilities in computer systems and ensure that they are secure and trustworthy."
 
“I’m fundamentally an optimist with regard to what we can do with research,” he said. “I’m fundamentally a pessimist with respect to what corporations who are fundamentally beholden to their stockholders do, because they’re always working on short-term appearance.”

Avoid Object Oriented Programming

Good advices: "In many programming courses and tutorials, everything is going along just fine when there's a sudden speed bump of vocabulary: objects and constructors and abstract base classes and private methods. Then in the next assignment the simple three-element tuple representing an RGB color is replaced by a class with getters and setters and multiple constructors and--most critically--a lot more code." in OOP Isn't a Fundamental Particle of Computing. It just put OOP in its right place.

See also Don't Distract New Programmers with OOP: "The shift from procedural to OO brings with it a shift from thinking about problems and solutions to thinking about architecture."

The cost of bugs

Infographic on the cost of bugs. Slightly biased to agile programming.

We do have a serious quality problem in software. Mainly driven by:

- Go to market pressure
- Lack of professionalism and craftmanship

2012: Software still sucks

We still have a record of bad software projects. See The Failed Record of the Software Industry. Questions (that we will try to answer):

1. Is it really so?
2. Why?
3. How can we change this?