Grady Booch on Technology Churn

From an MSDN chat with Grady Booch some straight forward good advice

Technology churn is always a challenge.... ...I would therefore offer the general guidance to those teams to focus on some of the best development practices, architecture first, the use of modeling, controlling your change management; these are fundamentals that will prepare you to absorb technological change, which you'll have to do over time.

Then a word on adoption in the context of emerging Web Services:

"I expect we will see organizations struggle to build their own kind of Web Services because they would initially choose to not build upon public services out there, unless they are provided by a platform member such as Microsoft. It simply has to do with trust, availability, security, and scalability. And so they will probably dabble by building their own services, and later build systems upon public services."

Just trust, availability, security, and scalability; these are so important, so real and the reason why software engineering as a profession has so far to go. Sure we need to innovate, but as consumers we need to take some control, it is fair enough to have to dabble, to experiment, but not all the time. To develop a full understanding of a system takes time, stability of purpose and context, in the constant churning world of Software we have neither. So ensure we have arcitecture and models and ensure we know what our system does and how we validate that it does it. That is, write real tests for it. Only then are we in a position to evaluate the next wave that churns our way and empirically decide whether it is of benefit.