Ten Years of "Impact" Columns—The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Ten years ago, we started the "Impact" column in IEEE Software. The goal when we started was to "build better quantitative insight into how software impacts various businesses. How the product uses the software and how the company built it are equally important."¹ This article is the 45th instance of the column. We have had 69 authors, mostly industry experts writing about the impact of software on their business and, in some cases, on its end users. Many of the authors had neither taken the time nor been given the opportunity to publish about their work before, so it gave them a forum to write about real systems: their size, their development methods, their economic and end-user impacts, and, perhaps most compelling of all, their ubiquity. The columns have been cited more than 400 times and have given our readers insights into some beautiful software solutions, in terms of both technology (e.g., the Mars rover²) and in terms of its impact on people (e.g., supporting farmers in Africa³). Our colleague, Zeljko Obrenovic, created a complete overview of the "Impact" column articles, which is available at https://www.obren359.com/collection.html?id=ieeesw/impact.