The phantom menace [software development]

In this world, the real phantom menace is the seductive idea that you can construct an optimal, engineering like process for developing high-quality software products. It´s this idea that gets the ball rolling toward the stultifying “filling in” to which my treasured notion of methodological excellence succumbed so long ago. It´s what threatens to steal the vitality from agile development organizations, to turn them into stodgy corporate IT department clones. A big part of the problem is with our analogies-the patterns to which we aspire. Is software development really like manufacturing? Is it really like engineering? Maybe we need some new patterns