I feel as if a lot of multipliers have happened that he didn't anticipate, but I also feel as if the culture of software engineering has kind of decomposed, since his day.
We seem to be getting a lot of fairly badly-done work out the door, very quickly, these days.
- agile and devops both conspire to treat developers as replaceable standins
- we're not even really expected to hang around and see the consequences of our decisions
- on arriving in a new organization, we're presented with a heap of trash we're asked to just sort of keep it running, certainly not to fix it
- 'industry standard best practices' win over a well designed bespoke solution every time, developers are just expected to write a little glue at most
- managers aren't expected to know anything about the domain at all, but to track people to make sure they did what they said they were going to
- speed to feature is the only metric. instability can be papered over with bodies
- we pretty much stopped systemic testing a couple decades ago
There is a lot of irony in that since the first plank of the agile manifesto is to put individuals in interactions first.
And I noticed you put the development process/structure first over the people who want to treat people as fungible.
I always liked the Manifesto, but it's really rather vague, and we engineers don't do "vague" so well, which leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
And authors.
And consultants.
And conference speakers.
Those are the ones that form what is eventually implemented. I'm not really sure any of the original signatories ever rolled up their sleeves, and worked to realize their vision.
It's my experience, that this is where the wheels start to come off the grand ideas.
That's one thing that I have to hand to Grady Booch. He came up with the idea, wrote it down, and then started to actually make tools to make it happen. Not sure if they really launched, but he did work to make his ideas into reality.