From “black art” to industrial discipline: The software crisis and the management of programmers

For almost as long as there has been software, there has been a software crisis. Laments about the inability of software developers to produce products on time, within budget, and of acceptable quality and reliability have been a staple of industry literature from the early decades of commercial computing to the present. In an industry characterized by rapid change and innovation, the rhetoric of the crisis has proven remarkably persistent. Rather than treating the software crisis as a well-defined and universally understood phenomenon, as it is often assumed to be in the industry and historical literature, this dissertation considers it as a socially constructed historical artifact. Ostensibly a debate about the “one best way” to manage a computer programming project, the software crisis was in reality a series of highly contested social negotiations about the role of electronic computing—and of computing professionals—in modern corporate and academic organizations. This dissertation explores the history of the computer in the modern corporation as viewed from the perspective of computer programmers. It describes the culture and methods of programming practice as they developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and traces the changes that occurred in these practices as the programming community transformed from a tightly knit family of “computer people” into a diverse and highly fragmented collection of programmer/coders, systems analysts, and information technology specialists. My argument is that the significant developments in software management that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s can best be understood as a jurisdictional struggle over control of the increasingly valuable occupational territory opened up by the electronic digital computer. Like any major new social or technological innovation, the computer could not simply be inserted, unchanged and unnoticed, into the well-established social, technological, and political systems that comprised the modern corporate organization. Just as the computer itself was gradually reconstructed, in response to a changing social and technical environment, from a scientific and military instrument into a mechanism for corporate communication and control, the modern business organization had to adapt itself to the presence of a powerful new technology