The IEEE Computer Society is the professional society for computing and software engineering within the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It publishes IEEE Software and Computer, the professional journals in which DeMarco published the 2009 essay software-engineering-an-idea-whose-time-has-come-and-gone — his public recantation of the structured methods tradition he had helped build.
Role in the software engineering profession
The IEEE Computer Society is the institutional center of the software engineering profession's self-understanding. It publishes the standards (including the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge, SWEBOK), the peer-reviewed journals, and the practitioner-facing magazines that constitute the professional literature of software engineering. DeMarco's early work in the structured-methods-era — the creation of structured analysis and the measurement frameworks in controlling-software-projects — was produced in the intellectual climate shaped partly by IEEE Computer Society publications and standards efforts.
The Society's journals have been a venue for both advocacy and critique of software engineering as a discipline. The standard-setting and methodological debates of the 1970s and 1980s — in which DeMarco was an active participant — played out in IEEE venues alongside the Yourdon Press books.
The 2009 recantation
The most significant single connection between the IEEE Computer Society and the DeMarco KB is the publication of software-engineering-an-idea-whose-time-has-come-and-gone in IEEE Software in July 2009. In this essay, DeMarco publicly questioned whether the software engineering discipline — to which he had been a foundational contributor — had delivered on its promises. The essay argued that the emphasis on measurement, process, and methodology had produced organizations that were better at controlling costs than at producing value, and that the focus on risk reduction had crowded out the creative and exploratory work that generates the most important software.
The ieee-recantation-essay event marks the beginning of what the DeMarco KB terms the reflective-era. Publishing the recantation in IEEE Software — the flagship practitioner journal of the professional society most closely associated with the software engineering project — gave the essay maximum visibility and impact within the community DeMarco was critiquing.
Relationship to the broader DeMarco arc
The IEEE Computer Society appears at the beginning and end of DeMarco's intellectual career in this KB: as the institutional context for the structured-methods-era work, and as the venue for the reflective-era self-critique. This arc — from disciplinary advocate to disciplinary skeptic, with the critique published in the discipline's own flagship journal — is one of the more unusual intellectual trajectories in software engineering.