Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
8
Engineering a Solution
We build software like the Wright brothers built airplanes: build the whole thing,
push it off a cliff, and start over again.
—Ronald Graham, NATO Conference on Software Engineering
1
Industrializing Software Development
In the collective memory of the programming community, the years
between 1968 and 1972 mark a major turning point in the history of its
industry and profession. It is during this period that the rhetoric of the
crisis became fi rmly entrenched in the vernacular of commercial comput-
ing. Although there had been earlier concerns expressed about “software
turmoil” and the “software gap,” it was not until 1968 that the word
“crisis” began to be applied to the challenges facing the software indus-
try. Within a few short years, the existence of a looming software crisis
had been widely and enthusiastically embraced within the popular and
industry literature. The discourse of crisis became one of the defi ning
features of the software industry; since the late 1960s, almost every new
computer-science curriculum proposal, programming technology, or
development methodology has positioned itself relative to this perception
of widespread crisis. Even those who deny the very existence of the crisis
are continually forced to engage with its pervasive discursive legacy.
2
To a certain degree the emergence of the software crisis of the late
1960s represents the culmination of a long series of concerns about
software: the seemingly perpetual shortage of programming personnel;
the burgeoning complexity of both application and systems software; the
apparent failure of automatic programming technologies to make the
process of programming less mysterious or more cost-effective; the pro-
fessional and political tensions inherent in management information
systems and other organizationally disruptive technologies; and a growing
