Since the late seventies, simplistic attempts have been made to emulate in software development data driven processes which had worked successfully in manufacturing environments.

Those same processes, which had brought manufacturing from “hand driven” pre-industrial activity to computer managed production lines, became popular with software managers, who saw in them an opportunity to “manage software projects with data”, the new dogma.

In reality, these processes added significant costs to the product without reaching the level of quality common in industrial processes.

To the question “Given the extraordinary variance in any software metric, what is the meaning of average software defect density?” a  learned scientist and internationally recognized expert in software engineering replied “All in all, the variance will take care of itself!!!”

Common sense had gone through the window. The era of software voodoo engineering had just begun.

The objective should be to put common sense back into software development.