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criticism of contemporary EDP practices published by McKinsey and
Company—lent credence to the popular belief that an industry-wide
software crisis was imminent. The industry literature from this period is
rife with scandals, complaints, laments, and self-recriminations.
This all suggests that by the mid-1960s, the rhetoric of crisis became
fi rmly entrenched in the vernacular of commercial computing. All of the
elements of the subsequent debates had been articulated: a widespread
critique of the artisanal practices of programmers; the growing tension
between the personnel demands of industry employers and the academic
agenda of university computer science departments; emerging turf battles
between technical experts and traditional corporate managers; and a
shared perception that software was becoming increasingly expensive,
expansive, infl uential, and out of control. The culmination of this period
of tension was the 1968 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
Conference on Software Engineering, widely regarded as one of the
seminal moments in the history of modern software development.
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By
defi ning the software crisis in terms of the discipline of software engineer-
ing, the NATO conference set an agenda that infl uenced many of the
technological, managerial, and professional developments in commercial
computing for the next several decades. In the interest of effi cient soft-
ware manufacturing, the black art of programming had to make way for
the science of software engineering.
The NATO conference has achieved almost mythical status in the lit-
erature on software development. Not only did it deeply imprint the
discourse of software crisis on the consciousness of both the computer
industry and the broader public; it also introduced a compelling solution.
The general consensus among historians and practitioners alike is that
the NATO meeting marked “a major cultural shift” in the computing
community, the moment when computer programming “started to make
the transition from being a craft for a long-haired programming priest-
hood to becoming a real engineering discipline.”
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The call to integrate
“good engineering principles” into the software development process has
been the rallying cry of software developers from the late 1960s to the
present.
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By defi ning the software crisis in terms of the discipline of
software engineering, the NATO conference set an agenda that substan-
tially infl uenced many of the technological, managerial, and professional
developments in commercial computing for the next several decades.
And yet, despite the consensus reached at the NATO conference, the
crisis continued to rage on. Although the specifi cs varied over time, the
core issues remained the same: a perceived shortage of a certain type of
