Software Engineering -- An Idea Whose Time Has Gone?

That's a powerful statement over there. One I'd never dare state (aloud, at least :). They are not my words, though, they are Tony DeMarco's, who famously said "You can't control what you can't measure" in his book, Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement, and Estimation, Prentice Hall/Yourdon Press, 1982.

Well, he hasn't changed his mind about that, but he seems to have come to the conclusion that the relative value of that, particularly balanced against the costs of measuring -- which he once discounted -- is not what he once thought. You can read it on this IEEE-published article.