Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
library (DSL) was a system of documents and procedures that provided
for the “isolation and delegation” of secretarial, clerical, and machine
operations.
43
In earlier accounts the DSL is referred to as the program-
ming production library. Basically, the DSL was a set of technologies
(including coding sheets, project notebooks, and computer control cards)
that facilitated communications within the development team. It was
envisioned as a means of further centralizing control in the hands of the
chief programmer. “The DSL permits a chief programmer to exercise a
wider span of control over the programming, resulting in fewer program-
mers doing the same job. This reduces communications requirements
and allows still more control in the programming. With structured
programming, this span of detailed control over code can be greatly
expanded beyond present practice; the DSL plays a crucial role in this
expansion.”
44
By providing a core set of public programs and documents that were
highly visible to all members of the surgical team, the DSL was supposed
to discourage the “traditional ad hoc mystique” associated with conven-
tional craft-oriented programming.
45
The chief programmer could read,
understand, and validate all of the work done by their subordinates. The
technology of the DSL was clearly intended to reinforce a conventional
management agenda: the transfer of control over the work practices of
programmers into the hands of the managerial superprogrammer. In
language remarkably reminiscent of the “head versus hand” dialectic
emphasized by Karl Marx and his disciples, one proponent of the CPT
approach described the DSL as having been “designed to separate the
clerical and intellectual tasks of programming.”
46
Although the CPT received much attention in the industry literature,
it does not seem to have been widely or successfully implemented.
47
The
original concept had been popularized by Baker in a series of articles
documenting the successful implementation of the approach by Mills.
Mills had been the chief programmer in a team that developed a com-
puterized information bank application for the
New York Times
. He
claimed to accomplished in twenty-two months what a traditionally,
hierarchically managed group would have required at least several more
years of calendar time to develop. Baker's favorable reports on the
New
York Times
project, which involved eighty-three thousand lines of code
and eleven man-years of effort, convinced many computer professionals
of the scalability of the CPT approach. The project was portrayed as
having high productivity and low error rates, although questions later
