The Works' M. Brambilla, Professor Barry Boehm about the Evolution of Software Development - Article Example

This article examines two different articles on software development but their approaches markedly differ from each other; the first article to be mentioned here more or less is theoretical in its treatment of the subject while the second article is more on application.Along this vein, I find the article written by Professor Barry Boehm to be complete and comprehensive on this topic. The said article presents the subject matter in a clear, precise and simple way for both experts and non-experts to understand.

The methodology is better and the conclusion sounder compared to the next article in this paper. This is because the writing style appeals to a much broader audience of readers but still was able to present enough technical details for people to grasp the significance of future developments. People are rightly concerned what effects if ever a large-scale malfunction or a system collapse that is software-induced will have on the entire world (Barry, 2006, p. 20) between now and the year 2025. Utter chaos will surely ensue and the consequences border on the nightmarish.

Barry has very wide views of the entire history and the theory behind each major milestone in software development; solid grounding, in theory, is a prerequisite before one attempts something. It is like how the atomic bomb got invented from the earlier theories developed by theoretical physicists. Prof. Barry further enlivened his essay with a prognosis of a world “flattened” by software. On the other hand, the second article by authors M. Brambilla et al. would appeal more to the technically-oriented people like software engineers and software programmers than ordinary people.

It is an excellent paper but is highly technical; it can be compared to looking at the trees rather than the forest and concerned more with the aspect of practical applications. In a sense, the article by M. Brambilla et al. is written in a more dense, academic style of writing and can serve as good reference material for software engineering enthusiasts. The article is more narrowly focused on one particular topic only, which is process modeling for Web applications (Brambilla et al., 2006, p. 406); in this regard, the article by Barry has a more solid grounding in the previous background literature on software engineering.

The analysis by Barry is also better as he talks on the entire continuum of software development rather than on just one specific area.