Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
place turned out to be even more challenging. Even the most basic human
cognitive processes are surprisingly diffi cult to reduce to a series of dis-
crete and unambiguous activities. The skills required to do so were not
just technical but also social and organizational. In order to computerize
a payroll system, for instance, an applications developer had to interview
everyone currently involved in the payroll process, comprehend and
document their contributions to the process in explicit detail—not failing
to account for exceptional cases and infrequent variations to normal
procedures—and then translate these complex activities fi rst into a form
that other programmers could understand and eventually into the precise
commands required by the computer. Since the payroll department did
not operate in isolation, it had to work with other departments to coor-
dinate activities, standardize the required inputs and outputs to the pro-
cedures, and negotiate points of confl ict and contention. It also had to
produce documentation, train users, arrange testing and verifi cation
procedures, and manage the logistics of implementation and rollout. All
of this had to happen without a major interruption of service, since
missing a payroll cycle would make everyone in the company extremely
unhappy. These were all of the activities associated with the broad term
software development. It is not hard to see why such development
required creativity, or also why such expressions of creativity could be
perceived as threatening. As Carl Reynolds of the Computer Usage
Corporation described the situation, “There's a tremendous gap between
what the programmers do and what the managers want, and they can't
express these things to each other.”
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In many companies, the various activities associated with software
development were split among several categories of computer personnel.
The primary division was between programmers and systems analysts.
The systems analysts were charged with the more organizational and
design-related activities, and programmers with the more technical
elements. But although many companies maintained seemingly rigid
hierarchies of occupational categories—junior programmer, senior pro-
grammer, systems analyst, and senior systems analyst—in practice these
neat divisions of labor quickly broke down.
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In any case, to the rest of
the corporation, both groups were generally referred to as programmers.
Computer programming, broadly defi ned to include the entire range of
activities associated with designing, producing, and maintaining hetero-
geneous software systems, remained an activity with ambiguous bound-
aries, a combination of technical, intellectual, and organizational
