It has been 15 years since the initial set of DOCSIS specs have been authored. In those 15 years software engineering has seen an explosion in productivity at the same time that the DOCSIS control plane has remained fairly unchanged. Can we apply these productivity tools to the DOCSIS control plane to facilitate greater simplicity and feature velocity? This paper will outline both software trends and protocol design trends that are relevant to the above discussion and how they can be applied to DOCSIS.