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as a means of countering charges of incompetence and cost ineffi ciency.
Academic computer scientists preferred a highly formalized approach to
software engineering that was both intellectually respectable and theo-
retically rigorous. Working programmers tended to concentrate on the
more personal aspects of professional accomplishment, including auton-
omy, status, and career longevity. The software engineering model
seemed to offer something for everyone: standards, quality, academic
respectability, status, and autonomy. As Michael Mahoney has sug-
gested, software engineering “was not coined to characterize an ongoing
activity but rather to express a desire for one. By 1967, when the com-
puter industry was less than twenty years old, people felt the need for
software engineering, even if they were not sure what it was.”
77
Yet the rhetorical fl exibility that had served the consensus-seeking
Garmisch participants proved unwieldy when it came to establishing
specifi c standards and practices. The Rome conference illuminated in
sharp relief the vast differences that existed between competing visions
for the software engineering discipline. Unlike the confl ict between
workers and managers described in the previous chapter, these divisions
were largely internal to the programming community. The primary split
was between academic computer scientists and commercial software
developers. The industry programmers resented being invited to Rome
“like a lot of monkeys to be looked at by theoreticians”; the theoreticians
complained of feeling isolated, of “not being allowed to say anything.”
78
As the editors of the conference proceedings have pointed out, the “lack
of communication between different sections of the participants” became
the “dominant feature” of the meeting.
79
“The seriousness of this com-
munications gap,” and the realization that it “was but a refl ection of the
situation in the real world,” caused the gap itself to become a major
topic of discussion.
80
It was to remain an issue of central concern to the
programming community for the next several decades.
Indeed, in the years after 1968 the rhetoric of the software crisis
became even more heated. In 1987 the editors of
Computerworld
com-
plained that “the average software project is often one year behind plan
and 100% over budget.”
81
In 1989 the House Committee on Science,
Space, and Technology released a report highly critical of the “shoot-
from-the-hip” practices of the software industry. Among other things,
the report called for a professional certifi cation program for program-
mers. The thirty-three-page report, “Bugs in the Program: Problems in
Federal Government Computer Software Development and Regulation,”
was written by staff members James H. Paul and Gregory C. Simon of
