Imagine the pope declaring that perhaps god doesn’t exist.

Tom DeMarco just published a short, but equally shocking article in IEEE Software. Recall he’s as much as the pope of software engineering as one can imagine, having authored influential works such as Peopleware and influenced virtually any methodologist and software architect since. His article culminates in:

I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that software engineering is an idea whose time has come and gone.

Unfortunately, I have to agree, and I came up pretty much the same tradition culminating in my involvement in the UML back in the days.

Go read the article!