State of the Art v State of the Practice: A Personal Perspective on the Changes in the Australian Software Engineering Landscape

Summary form only given. The Global Software Industry has undergone some dramatic changes. From the high tech bubble of late 1990's, to the tech crash of 2001, to the globalisation of IT services, to the beginning of utility computing, to most recently the impact of governance regulations such as Sarbannes Oxley. The Australian software industry has also been dramatically affected by these global changes. These changes have impacted the structure of market for software engineering services, changed the willingness of investors to enter the software engineering market and changed the nature of the demand for, and the suppliers of, software engineering services. All these changes have had significant impacts on the state of practice of software engineering - some good, some not so good. This presentation provides a personal view of these changes and how they have affected the state of practice of software engineering in the Australian market. In particular the presentation looks at how attempts to undertake process improvement have changed over this time. Specific examples of our own work in deploying a state of the art software development process, Process Mentor, to software companies large and small provides the backdrop to these discussions.