The Outward Spiral
David Alan Grier · Computer · 2020
Reports on Barry Boehm’s article, “A Spiral Model of Software Development and Enhancement,”1 is a classic in the fullest sense of the word (see “Article Facts”). It is ranked as the seventh most influential article published in Computer and presents an idea that is a foundation for software engineering. If this was the only article that Computer had ever published, we could honestly say the magazine had done a good job for our discipline. Yet, Boehm’s article is also classic in the sense that it comes from another world, one that did not have Java, Python, .net, or other development frameworks; no application programming interfaces (APIs); no virtual machines; and no Agile frameworks. It was published in 1988, a year that was closer to the founding conference of software engineering, the 1968 NATO Garmisch conference, than it is to our time. While it is possible to read this article as an elementary description of the spiral model, a key software engineering process, it is best read as an article that asks us to reconsider software engineering methods and think carefully about our current approach to software engineering problems.