Bjarne Stroustrup on what should be taught to new software developers in college

Bjarne Stroustrup's article titled "What Should We Teach New Software Developers? Why" (Communications of the ACM, Vol. 53 No. 1, Pages 40-42 ).

Craft, cooperative gaming and lessons from lean manufacturing

Alistair Cockburn, in his thought-provoking publications titled "From Agile Development to the New Software Engineering", shows how software engineering is built on the following three legs and what to make of it. A few excerpts:

• Craft -  "Being in a craft profession brings with it certain expectations, such as lifelong learning, or “deepening” the proficiency in one’s craft. Programmers shouldn’t think that just because they once learned to program a computer, their programming skills are still sufficient. As craft professionals, programmers, project managers and others should always be looking to learn new tools, and techniques, and get better in the ones they have. [Cockburn]"
• Cooperative gaming - "Every game and every situation are potentially different – there is no formula for winning the game. Different, even opposite strategies may be needed at any instant; The quality of a move in the game is not absolute, but rather, is only relative to how it improves the position of the team for its next move; The quality of community and communication among the team members matter enormously – they often make the difference between success and failure. [Cockburn]"
• Lessons from lean manufacturing - "... people hand other people decisions; people wait on each other for decisions; and some people have a bigger backlog of decisions than they can handle at the moment. Examining the dependency network of decisions in play in an organization, we see that this network is very similar to the dependency network of parts in a manufacturing plant. Quite surprisingly, the same mathematics applies to the situation, and many of the same strategies apply: just-in-time, pull, continuous flow, and so on. [Cockburn]"

Software Engineering Method and Theory (SEMAT)

Anyone who has worked in the software industry for a few years, in all likelihood, wouldn't find it hard to acknowledge that the state of practice in software development has a long way to go.
 
Visit Software Engineering Method and Theory (SEMAT) for a community working on developing a framework for improving the state of practice in software. Its heartening to see a list of great signatories on this initiative.
 
The SEMAT call for action states:

Software engineering is gravely hampered today by immature practices. Specific problems include:  

• The prevalence of fads more typical of fashion industry than of an engineering discipline.
• The lack of a sound, widely accepted theoretical basis.
• The huge number of methods and method variants, with differences little understood and artificially magnified.
• The lack of credible experimental evaluation and validation.
• The split between industry practice and academic research.

Visit here for SEMAT publications and references.