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I have a soft spot for Grady Booch. We knew back in 1993 that he was a hippy, what with all those dotty clouds. Today (you ca see below) he’s still a hippy! A greying, post-heart-surgery, eminent software development guru hippy with a penchant for Halo. It’s a good thing Jacobsen and Rumbaugh set him on the straight and rectangular when they U-ed their respective MLs.

Below is a video embed (courtesy of the YUI Theater) of Grady giving a version of his Turing Lecture “The Promise, the Limits, the Beauty of Software” to an audience at Yahoo!

It’s a heavy sprinkling of software history and a boat-load of personal anecdotes. The anecdotes are especially valuable, as they’re from the perspective of someone who has incredible access to many of the major software development projects and organizations around the world.

It’s jam-packed with golden nuggets of wisdom and fore-warning. Around 8 minutes in he warns about perpetuating organizational silos with (what I’d call) interior-decorator SOA. At 36 minutes he talks about assessing an organization’s maturity through their release frequencies, the presence of a “culture of patterns” and a system or organization. He moves on to Boehm and COCOMO, and the observation that complexity is the dominant determinant of project cost — bad process is something that amplifies the effect of complexity and good process dampens it.

In all, it’s a nice introduction to the how and why of software development and how we got to where we are today.