The future of software engineering

The future of software engineering is: Standardization. Why? Achieving quality at a large scale, in a reproducible way.

Quality isn’t “optional”.
Quality isn’t “nice to have”.
Quality isn’t “when I have time for it”.

Why standardization?

• Quality can not be achieved without standards.
• Efficiency and cost reduction also cannot be achieved without standards.
• Neither can scalability and consistency of results.

Let’s look at other industries: Civil Engineering Standards. Automotive Standards. Healthcare Standards. Standards helped in increasing consistency and reliability, whilst also enabling innovation. There isn’t an option to just “skip” certain standards (or otherwise face regulatory fines).

In software engineering, standards would bring the following:

• Higher quality, minimizing bugs. Increased customer satisfaction.
• Reduced time-to-market, shipping new features faster, being able to enhance the product instead of wasting time on regression bugs.

But what’s the current reality in the software industry? How well are standards defined? To what extent are they enforced?

P.S. Standardization does not mean removing creativity and innovation, it doesn’t mean that software development would become a factory (this is a common misconception people have when they hear the word “standardization”. Instead, standardization would support the industry to innovate. But that could be a topic for a future post.

At a small scale, quality may be achieved due to individuals even without standardization – but if you want to achieve a quality level in a systematic reproducible way across a larger scale, that’s when quality becomes important.