Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
down on this situation by the self-proclaimed cloak of sophistication and
mystique which falsely claims immunity from normal management
methods. They are still being held at bay by the computer people's major
weapon—the snow job.”
100
Computer department staffs, although “they
may be superbly equipped, technically speaking, to respond to manage-
ment's expectations,” are “seldom strategically placed (or managerially
trained)—to fully assess the economics of operations or to judge opera-
tional feasibility.”
101
Only the restorations of the proper balance between
computer personnel and managers could save the software projects from
a descent into “unprogrammed and devastating chaos.”
102
The Road to Garmisch
In the late 1960s, new perspectives on the problem of programmer man-
agement began to appear in the industry literature. “There is a vast
amount of evidence to indicate that writing—a large part of program-
ming is writing after all, albeit in a special language for a very restricted
audience—can be planned, scheduled and controlled, nearly all of which
has been fl agrantly ignored by both programmers and their managers,”
argued Robert Gordon in 1968 in a review of contemporary software
development practices.
103
Although it was admittedly true “that pro-
gramming a computer is more an art than a science, that in some of its
aspects it is a creative process,” this new perspective on software man-
agement suggested that “as a matter of fact, a modicum of intelligent
effort can provide a very satisfactory degree of control.”
104
It was the NATO Conference on Software Engineering in 1968 that
irrevocably established software management as one of the central rhe-
torical cornerstones of all future debates about the nature and causes of
the software crisis. In the fall of that year, as mentioned earlier, a diverse
group of infl uential computer scientists, corporate managers, and mili-
tary offi cials gathered in Garmisch, Germany, to discuss their growing
concern that the production of software had become “a scare item for
management . . . an unprofi table morass, costly and unending.” The
solution to the budding software crisis, the conference organizers claimed,
was for computer programmers to embrace an industrialized software
engineering approach to development. By defi ning the software crisis in
terms of the discipline of software engineering, the NATO conference
set an agenda that infl uenced many of the technological, managerial, and
professional developments in commercial computing for the next several
decades.
