Platitudes and attitudes

Abstract.

In October 2002 I attended the Ninth Monterey Software Engineering workshop held in Venice, Italy. This year’s theme was titled “Radical Innovations of Software and Systems Engineering in the Future.” In preparing my talk for the workshop, I thought hard about what I could possibly say on this topic that would not sound stupid. I certainly thought it would be awfully presumptious of me to predict how people will or should be developing software in the future. More easily, I could imagine what the systems of tomorrow will look like and who will be developing them, though anything I would say would sound like platitudes. I could also state some strong opinions about what matters and what doesn’t in the process of software development. Stating such attitudes would at least provoke some discussion. Hence, what follows captures some of what I said at the workshop.