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84
NATO SOFTWARE ENGINEERING CONFERENCE 1968
8. Invited Addresses
pragmatic in their choice of methods. They strike largely reasonable balances between generality and specificity and seldom use absolutely inappropriate approaches in any individual software component. But the profit motive wherefrom springs these virtues also begets their prime hangup — systems now. The system comes first; components are merely annoying incidentals. Out of these treadmills I don’t expect to see high class components of general utility appear.
A Components Factory
Having shown that it is unlikely to be born among the traditional suppliers of software I turn now to the question of just how a components industry might get started.
There is some critical size to which the industry must attain before it becomes useful. Our purveyor of 300 sine routines would probably go broke waiting for customers if that’s all he offered, just as an electronics firm selling circuit modules for only one purpose would have trouble in the market.
It will take some time to develop a useful inventory, and during that time money and talent will be needed. The first source of support that comes to mind is governmental, perhaps channeled through semi-independent research corporations. It seems that the fact that government is the biggest user and owner of machines should provide sufficient incentive for such an undertaking that has promise for making an across-the-board improvement in systems development.
Even before founding a pilot plant, one would be wise to have demonstrated techniques for creating a parameterized family of routines for a couple of familiar purposes, say a sine routine and a Fortran I/O module. These routines should be shown to be useable as replacements in a number of radically different environments. This demonstration could be undertaken by a governmental agency, a research contractor, or by a big user, but certainly without expectation of immediate payoff.
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The industrial orientation of a pilot plant must be constantly borne in mind. I think that the whole project is an improbable one for university research. Research-calibre talent will be needed to do the job with satisfactory economy and reliability, but the guiding spirit of the undertaking must be production oriented. The ability to produce members of a family is not enough. Distribution, cataloguing, and rational planning of the mix of product families will in the long run be more important to the success of the venture than will be the purely technical achievement.
The personnel of a pilot plant should look like the personnel on many big software projects, with the masses of coders removed. Very good planning, and strongly product-minded supervision will be needed. There will be perhaps more research flavor included than might be on an ordinary software project, because the level of programming here will be more abstract: Much of the work will be in creating generators of routines rather than in making the routines themselves.
Testing will have to be done in several ways. Each member of a family will doubtless be tested against some very general model to assure that sale-time binding causes no degradation over runtime binding. Product test will involve transliterating the routines to fit in representative hardware. By monitoring the ease with which fairly junior people do product test, managers could estimate the clarity of the product, which is important in predicting customer acceptance.
Distribution will be a ticklish problem. Quick delivery may well be a components purveyor’s most valuable sales stimulant. One instantly thinks of distribution by communication link. Then even very small components might be profitably marketed. The catalogue will be equally important. A comprehensive and physically condensed document like the Sears-Roebuck catalogue is what I would like to have for my own were I purchasing components.
Once a corpus of product lines became established and profit potential demonstrated, I would expect software houses to take over the industry. Indeed, were outside support long needed, I would say the venture had failed (and try to forget I had ever proposed it).
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Touching on Standards
I don’t think a components industry can be standardized into existence. As is usual with standards, it would be rash to standardize before we have the models. Language standards, provided they are loose enough not to prevent useful