Information Technology Reference
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sense at all levels of society that the changes associated with the computer
revolution were more fundamental and pervasive—and at times intru-
sive—than had previously been anticipated.
3
What is novel and signifi cant about the software crisis discourse,
therefore, was not in its identifi cation of a series of problems but rather
in the nature of its proposed solutions. For most historians as well as
most contemporary observers, the software crisis of the late 1960s was
defi ned by the emergence of new software-engineering approaches to the
problems of software development.
The phrase “software engineering” appears to have fi rst been used by
the hardware engineer J. Presper Eckert in an address to the Eastern Joint
Computer Conference in 1965 in reference to the growing confl ict between
computer programmers and their corporate employers. Computer pro-
gramming “would only be manageable,” he claimed, “when we could
refer to it as 'software engineering.'”
4
But it was the 1968 NATO
Conference on Software Engineering that marks the moment that software
engineering dramatically entered the public consciousness.
In October 1968, a diverse group of academic computer scientists,
corporate managers, and military offi cials gathered in Garmisch,
Germany, for the fi rst-ever NATO Conference on Software Engineering.
The conference was intended to address what many industry observers
believed to be an impending crisis in software production. Large software
development projects had acquired a reputation for being behind sched-
ule, over budget, and bug ridden. The solution to the so-called software
crisis, suggested the conference organizers, was for software developers
to adopt a more methodical and industrial approach. The phrase “soft-
ware engineering” was “deliberately chosen as being provocative,” sug-
gested the conference organizers, “in implying a need for software
manufacturing to be based on the types of theoretical foundations and
practical disciplines that are traditional in the established branches of
engineering.”
5
In the interest of effi cient software manufacturing, the
black art of programming had to make way for the science of software
engineering.
By defi ning the software crisis in terms of the discipline of software
engineering, the conference set an agenda that infl uenced many of the
technological, managerial, and professional developments in commercial
computing for the next several decades. The general consensus among
historians and practitioners alike is that the Garmisch meeting marked
a major cultural shift in the perception of programming. In the aftermath
of Garmisch, “software writing started to make the transition from being
