2. SOFTWARE ENGINEERING AND SOCIETY
One of the major motivations for the organizing of the conference was an awareness of the rapidly increasing importance of computer software systems in many activities of society. Thus, although much of the conference was concerned with detailed technical questions, many of the discussions were of a more general nature, and should be of interest to a wide spectrum of readers. It is for the benefit of this wider audience that representative discussions of various points relating to the impact of software engineering on society have been abstracted from later sections of this Report, and collected in this introductory section.
First, three quotations which indicate the rate of growth of software:
Helms: In Europe alone there are about 10,000 installed computers — this number is increasing at a rate of anywhere from 25 per cent to 50 per cent per year. The quality of software provided for these computers will soon affect more than a quarter of a million analysts and programmers.
David: No less a person than T.J. Watson said that OS/360 cost IBM over $50 million dollars a year during its preparation, and at least 5000 man-years’ investment. TSS/360 is said to be in the 1000 man-year category. It has been said, too, that development costs for software equal the development costs for hardware in establishing a new machine line.
d’Agapeyeff: In 1958 a European general purpose computer manufacturer often had less than 50 software programmers, now they probably number 1,000-2,000 people; what will be needed in 1978?
Yet this growth rate was viewed with more alarm than pride.
David: In computing, the research, development, and production phases are often telescoped into one process. In the competitive rush to make available the latest techniques, such as on-line consoles served by time-shared computers, we strive to take great forward leaps across gulfs of unknown width and depth. In the cold light of day, we know that a step-by-step approach separating research and development from production is less risky and more likely to be successful. Experience indeed indicates that for software tasks similar to previous ones, estimates are accurate to within 10–30 percent in many cases. This situation is familiar in all fields lacking a firm theoretical base. Thus, there are good reasons why software tasks that include novel concepts involve not only uncalculated but also uncalculable risks.
This is not meant to indicate that the software field does not have its successes.
Hastings: I work in an environment of some fourteen large installations using OS/360. These are complex systems, being used for many very sophisticated applications. People are doing what they need to do, at a much lower cost than ever before, and they seem to be reasonably satisfied.
Buxton: Ninety-nine percent of computers work tolerably satisfactorily. There are thousands of respectable Fortran-oriented installations using many different machines, and lots of good data processing applications running steadily.
However, there are areas of the field which were viewed by many participants with great concern.
Kolence: The basic problem is that certain classes of systems are placing demands on us which are beyond our capabilities and our theories and methods of design and production at this time. There are many areas where there is no such thing as a crisis — sort routines, payroll applications, for example. It is large systems that are encountering great difficulties. We should not expect the production of such systems to be easy.
David and Fraser: Particularly alarming is the seemingly unavoidable fallibility of large software, since a malfunction in an advanced hardware-software system can be a matter of life and death.
Dijkstra: The dissemination of knowledge is of obvious value — the massive dissemination of error-loaded software is frightening.