Regress or Progress? Seeing Good Software Engineering Ideas Through

In the last edition of From the Editor ("Deja Vu: The Life of Software Engineering Ideas," January/February 2010), I wrote about how modern software engineering ideas evolve. I represented an idea\´s maturation life cycle from conception to streaming in terms of nine states, interactions with the life cycle of other related ideas, and regressive loops that preempt an idea\´s normal progression and revert it to a previous state. In this edition, I discuss the levers that help prevent reversion, or at least premature reversion, and push a worthwhile idea forward toward the streamed state. These levers work only for good ideas, or those that have genuine merit, and before the idea reaches the streamed state. Once an idea reaches that point, we don\´t have much control; short attention spans are inevitably diverted elsewhere.