The Computer Boys Take Over by Nathan L. Ensmenger

Author:Nathan L. Ensmenger [Ensmenger, Nathan L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crónica, Historia, Tecnología
Publisher: ePubLibre
Published: 2010-08-13T04:00:00+00:00

The Road to Garmisch

In the late 1960s, new perspectives on the problem of programmer management began to appear in the industry literature. “There is a vast amount of evidence to indicate that writing—a large part of programming is writing after all, albeit in a special language for a very restricted audience—can be planned, scheduled and controlled, nearly all of which has been flagrantly ignored by both programmers and their managers,” argued Robert Gordon in 1968 in a review of contemporary software development practices.[473] Although it was admittedly true “that programming a computer is more an art than a science, that in some of its aspects it is a creative process,” this new perspective on software management suggested that “as a matter of fact, a modicum of intelligent effort can provide a very satisfactory degree of control.”[474]

It was the NATO Conference on Software Engineering in 1968 that irrevocably established software management as one of the central rhetorical cornerstones of all future debates about the nature and causes of the software crisis. In the fall of that year, as mentioned earlier, a diverse group of influential computer scientists, corporate managers, and military officials gathered in Garmisch, Germany, to discuss their growing concern that the production of software had become “a scare item for management . . . an unprofitable morass, costly and unending.” The solution to the budding software crisis, the conference organizers claimed, was for computer programmers to embrace an industrialized software engineering approach to development. By defining the software crisis in terms of the discipline of software engineering, the NATO conference set an agenda that influenced many of the technological, managerial, and professional developments in commercial computing for the next several decades.

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