Ancestors

Written by Elisabeth Hendrickson on 2025-01-28 at 23:11

Reading the NATO report on software engineering that came out of the 1968 conference where the term "software crisis" was coined. (It's at https://www.scrummanager.com/files/nato1968e.pdf if you want to read it too.)

Currently on page 11. ELEVEN. (Out of 200+.) It says right here: "The need for feedback was stressed many times."

We knew. Have always known. Feedback is the key to everything. Any process that intentionally delays feedback is going to run into problems. We took such a wrong turn in the 1990s. Ugh.

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Written by Elisabeth Hendrickson on 2025-01-28 at 23:55

Now reading Randell's 1979 comments on the 1968 report (https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/800091.802915). He quotes J.W. Smith:

"I'm still bemused by the way they attempt to build software... They begin with planning specification, go through functional specifications, implementation specifications, etc., etc. If you look down the PERT-chart you discover that all the nodes on it up until the last one produce nothing but paper. It is unfortunately true that people confuse the menu with the meal."

(edited for brevity)

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Written by Elisabeth Hendrickson on 2025-01-28 at 23:55

"Don't confuse the menu with the meal" is my new favorite phrase.

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Written by Elisabeth Hendrickson on 2025-01-29 at 01:18

Back to the 1968 report. SO MANY GOOD QUOTES. Gonna thread a few of my favs.

"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." -- Graham

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Written by Elisabeth Hendrickson on 2025-01-29 at 01:19

"I know of one organisation that attempts to apply time and motion standards to the output of programmers. They judge a programmer by the amount of code he produces. This is guaranteed to produce insipid code — code which does the right thing but which is twice as long as necessary." -- McClure

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Written by Elisabeth Hendrickson on 2025-01-29 at 01:27

“There are two classes of system designers. The first, if given five problems will solve them one at a time. The second will come back and announce that these aren’t the real problems, and will eventually propose a solution to the single problem which underlies the original five. This is the ‘system type’ who is great during the initial stages of a design project. However, you had better get rid of him after the first six months if you want to get a working system.” — Kinslow

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Written by Elisabeth Hendrickson on 2025-01-29 at 01:29

I'll just stop here. The entire paper is AMAZING. You can find a copy here: http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/nato1968.PDF

Seriously, I wish I'd read this report earlier. So many of the pain points that the participants discuss will feel familiar to anyone in software. Technology has changed. People have not. We have some better answers now than we did then. But we still have the same pressures, and illusions, that led to the original declaration of a "crisis."

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Written by Elisabeth Hendrickson on 2025-01-29 at 02:26

Oh! One more. Last one, I swear:

"As one single example of such a source of ideas I would like to mention: Christopher Alexander: Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Harvard Univ. Press, 1964)" -- Naur.

Yup, that's right. The connection between Alexander's work on architecture and software was made as early as 1968. 😮

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Written by Elisabeth Hendrickson on 2025-01-29 at 02:50

OK OK this one is the last one. I think I have found the earliest use of the notion of a walking skeleton. Again, this is 1968.

"Begin with skeletal coding: Rather than aiming at finished code, the 46 first coding steps should be aimed at exploring interfaces, sizes of critical modules, complexity, and adequacy of the modules... The contributions of this step should be insight and experience, with the aim of exploring feasibility." -- David

(edited for brevity)

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