The phantom menace

In this world, the real phantom menace is the seductive idea that you can construct an optimal, engineering like process for developing high-quality software products. It's this idea that gets the ball rolling toward the stultifying “filling in” to which my treasured notion of methodological excellence succumbed so long ago. It's what threatens to steal the vitality from agile development organizations, to turn them into stodgy corporate IT department clones. A big part of the problem is with our analogies-the patterns to which we aspire. Is software development really like manufacturing? Is it really like engineering? Maybe we need some new patterns. © 1999 IEEE