Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the House
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
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Later that same year
the Pentagon launched a broad campaign to “lick its software problems”
that included funds for a Software Engineering Institute and the wide-
spread adoption of the ADA programming language. ADA was touted
by Department of Defense offi cials as “a means of replacing the idiosyn-
cratic 'artistic' ethos that has long governed software writing with a more
effi cient, cost-effective engineering mind-set.”
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The list of critical reports,
denunciations of current practices, and proposed silver-bullet solutions
goes on and on. In his 1996 summary of the legacy the fi rst NATO
Conference, W. Wayt Gibbs suggested that “a quarter of a century later
software engineering remains a term of aspiration,” rather than a real
accomplishment: “The vast majority of computer code is still hand-
crafted from raw programming languages by artisans using techniques
they neither measure nor are able to repeat consistently.”
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