Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
conference. The industry literature of the period is replete with examples
of this changing attitude toward software management. Even those
proposals that seemed to be most explicitly technical, such as those
advocating structured programming techniques or high-level language
developments, contained a strong managerial component. Most required
a rigid division of labor and the adoption of tight management controls
over worker autonomy. When a prominent adherent of object-oriented
programming techniques spoke of “transforming programming from a
solitary cut-to-fi t craft, like the cottage industries of colonial America,
into an organizational enterprise like manufacturing is today,” he
was referring not so much to the adoption of a specifi c technology
but rather to the imposition of established and traditional forms of
labor organization and workplace relationships. 11 The solutions to the
software crisis most frequently recommended by managers—among
them the elimination of rule-of-thumb methods (i.e., the black art
of programming), the scientifi c selection and training of program-
mers, the development of new forms of management, and the effi cient
division of labor—were not fundamentally different from the four prin-
ciples of scientifi c management espoused by Frederick Taylor in an
earlier era. 12
Aristocracy, Democracy, and Systems Design
In practice, software engineering was more an expression of ideals than
a well-defi ned agenda. At best it was a loose collection of techniques,
technologies, institutions, and practices. 13 As Stuart Shapiro has sug-
gested, the essence of the software-engineering movement was control:
control over complexity, control over budgets and scheduling, and,
perhaps most signifi cantly, control over a recalcitrant workforce. 14
Although a number of technological or procedural innovations were
developed to facilitate software engineering—structure programming
techniques, the ADA programming language, Computer-Aided Software
Engineering (CASE) environments—the focus of most software-engineer-
ing efforts were managerial. In this sense, software engineering represents
the culmination of the turn toward managerial solutions to the software
crisis that characterized the late 1960s.
Unhappy with the ballooning costs of software development, threat-
ened by the growing power of the computer people, and frustrated by
the apparent inability of either academic computer science or the profes-
Search WWH ::




Custom Search