Evolving Principles

In the introduction of Alan M. Davis’ 201 Principles of Software Development, the author wrote: If we were to examine the set of software engineering principles from 1964 they would look downright silly today (for example, always use short variable names, or do whatever it takes to make your program smaller). Today’s principles will look equally silly in thirty years. Alan M. Davis, 201 Principles of Software Development, page 5. That book was published in 1995, so it now has been thirty years. Quite a lot has happened since. Software has become larger, longer-lived and ubiquitous in a way that it simple was not back then. Consider the emergence and massive growth of the Internet, web and mobile applications, cloud computing, IoT, machine learning, and so forth. The book predates the publication of the agile manifesto by several years. In the decades since, development teams have experimented with or adopted many new methods and frameworks. In recent years, artificial intelligence has…