The modest software engineer

Autonomous decentralised systems must be dependable or they will be unhelpful, at best, and may cause serious harm. Despite major advances in theoretical computer science and software engineering, industrial practice has not kept pace and most software intensive system development projects fail. If we are to achieve the benefits promised by new system architectures, industry will have to adopt much more rigorous software engineering practices, and universities will have to extend the amount of software engineering they teach, and to use such methods routinely on their own projects.