Chapter17.History Lesson

Chapter 17. History Lesson

In 1993 and 1994, I lived in Stockholm, on assignment at one of our largest and most important customers. Jaak Urmi, my friend and temporary boss, insisted that I spend an afternoon at the Vasa Museum in Stockholm Harbor. The museum is "one of a kind."^[1] The Vasa was the pride of the Swedish Royal Navy, launched in August 1628. Twenty minutes into her maiden voyage, she caught a small gust and sank to the bottom of Stockholm Harbor. She was raised 333 years later and today is meticulously restored and on display. Because there have been centuries to work on a post-mortem, and because naval architecture has made significant advances during this time, we now know a lot about why the Vasa sank. Some interesting lessons can be learned from this fiasco, and some of them apply to software development.^[2]

^[1] See http://www.vasamuseet.se.

^[2] Tom Love and I independently made the connection between software and the Vasa at about the same time. See Tom Love, Object Lessons: Lessons Learned in Object-Oriented Development Projects (New York: SIGS Books, 1993), p. 1-6. This material was originally written in February 1994 and was published in the Rational technical newsletter as "What Can We Learn from the Vasa?" The Sheep (#40, June 1995), p. 7-8. It also appeared, with permission and attribution, in Pierre Robillard and Philippe Kruchten, Software Engineering Processes: With the UPEDU (Boston: Pearson Education, 2002), p. 151-152.