Although new tools, technologies, ideas and practices continue to advance the state of the art, the big question for all practitioners is which of these advances will actually turn out to be useful. Sure, some like Extreme Programming style unit testing seem to have a secure future, but so did cleanroom software development. The future of code walkthroughs and design reviews seemed certain, but they never became a mainstream practice.

So what makes some advances stick and makes others disappear seemingly without trace? How we can influence the advances that survive? Are there any obvious things that we are missing? What advances should we be promoting? What should software quality look like in 10 years time? How about in 20 years time?