Software Engineering – An Unconsummated Marriage (1998, Parnas)

There's nothing new here (trouble is nothing has been about it):

"TRENDS IN COMPUTING by W. Wayt Gibbs, staff writer. Scientific American; September 1994; Page 86 : Despite 50 years of progress, the software industry remains years-perhaps decades-short of the mature engineering discipline needed to meet the demands of an information-age society."

http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~jdalbey/SWE/Papers/SciAmGibbs/...

The question is why.

Actually, W. Wayt Gibbs answers the question. Essentially, programmers do not treat programming with the same level of discipline and responsibility as engineers do in other engineering professions (like say bridge building where people's lives are at stake). Programmers essentially consider themselves as artists and thus they program in undisciplined ways. (A software engineering profession won't evolve until the software industry takes itself seriously as do other professions).

Sorry for the weird format. I grabbed it from here:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/software/1998/parnas-19981208...

I then ran it through "uncompress" and "ps2pdf" and then finally "pdf2html".