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10
NATO SOFTWARE ENGINEERING CONFERENCE 1968
2. Software Engineering and Society
There was general agreement that ‘software engineering’ is in a very rudimentary stage of development as compared with the established branches of engineering.
McIlroy: We undoubtedly produce software by backward techniques. We undoubtedly get the short end of the stick in confrontations with hardware people because they are the industrialists and we are the crofters. Software production today appears in the scale of industrialization somewhere below the more backward construction industries.
Kolence: Programming management will continue to deserve its current poor reputation for cost and schedule effectiveness until such time as a more complete understanding of the program design process is achieved.
Fraser: One of the problems that is central to the software production process is to identify the nature of progress and to find some way of measuring it. Only one thing seems to be clear just now. It is that program construction is not always a simple progression in which each act of assembly represents a distinct forward step and that the final product can be described simply as the sum of many sub-assemblies.
Graham: Today we tend to go on for years, with tremendous investments to find that the system, which was not well understood to start with, does not work as anticipated. We build systems like the Wright brothers built airplanes — build the whole thing, push it off the cliff, let it crash, and start over again.
Of course any new field has its growing pains:
Gillette: We are in many ways in an analogous position to the aircraft industry, which also has problems producing systems on schedule and to specification. We perhaps have more examples of bad large systems than good, but we are a young industry and are learning how to do better.
Many people agreed that one of the main problems was the pressure to produce even bigger and more sophisticated systems.
Opler: I am concerned about the current growth of systems, and what I expect is probably an exponential growth of errors. Should we have systems of this size and complexity? Is it the manufacturer’s fault for producing them or the user’s for demanding them? One shouldn’t ask for large systems and then complain about their largeness.
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Buxton: There are extremely strong economic pressures on manufacturers, both from users and from other manufacturers. Some of these pressures, which are a major contributory cause of our problems, are quite understandable. For example, the rate of increase of air traffic in Europe is such that there is a pressing need for an automated system of control.
This being the case, perhaps the best quotation to use to end this short section of the report is the following:
Gill: It is of the utmost importance that all those responsible for large projects involving computers should take care to avoid making demands on software that go far beyond the present state of technology) unless the very considerable risks involved can be tolerated.