Conception of Software Engineering
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In August 1996 about a dozen historians met with about a dozen computer scientists to discuss the history of software engineering. The term software engineering has been deliberately chosen as being provocative at the 1968 NATO Conference on Software Engineering. This notion was meant to imply that software manufacture should be based on the types of theoretical foundations and practical disciplines that are established in the traditional branches of engineering. This need was motivated by the so-called software crisis. Ever since, the debate whether such a crisis exists has continued within the software engineering community. It is a crucial question,because if the answer is yes, software engineering may not be called an engineering discipline yet. If the answer were no, the question would be, what is it that constitutes this discipline.
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It turned out at the seminar that there may or may not be a software crisis, but there is definitely what might be called an identity crisis. A strong indicator for this phenomenon is the fact that after more than 30 years computer scientists are investigating the history of other established branches of engineering to find out what should be done to turn software engineering into a sound engineering discipline. In this endeavor, historians were regarded to be some kind of universal problem solvers who were called in whenever a general answer to some fundamental question was needed.
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Of course, this could not work, because history is not a methodical vehicle to clarify ones own identity or to derive normative principles and guidelines for a discipline. Furthermore, there is only little historic knowledge in the field of software engineering as compared to the"History of Programming Languages", for instance, or the history of electronic calculating devices. Thus, a seminar on the"History of Software Engineering"can only act as a starting point, providing a first overview of what has been accomplished so far and identify crucial issues to be studied in the future.
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1996年8月,大约有十几位历史学家与十几位计算机专家进行了会晤以讨论软件工程的历史。软件工程这个术语是作为1968年北大西洋公约组织软件工程会议争论的议题而特意命名的。此概念隐含的意思是:软件的生产应该以已有的传统工程分支中建立起来的理论基础和实践规程类型为基础。这一需求是由所谓的软件危机而引起的。从那以后,关于是否存在软件危机的争论在软件工程领域中就一直继续着。这是一个非常重要的问题,因为如果答案是肯定的,那么软件工程就还不能被称为工程学科;如果答案是否定的,那么这个问题将是:该学科到底是由什么构成的。
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该研讨会得出的结果是:软件危机或许存在,或许不存在,但一个可以称为特征危机的危机确实存在。这种现象的一个最强烈的表现是这样一个事实:在历经了30多年之后,计算机专家们仍在研究已建立起来的其他工程分支的历史,以发现应该做些什么才能把软件工程变成健全的工程学科。在这种努力中,历史学家们被认为是能够解决某种普遍问题的解决者,因此,无论什么时候,当重要问题需要一般的答案时,都要把他们召集起来。
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当然,这种做法并没有什么效果,因为历史并不是一个能阐明自己特征,或为一个学科导出规范原理或指导原则的井井有条的工具。此外,比如说,与程序设计语言历史或电子计算设备历史相比,软件工程领域的历史知识只是一点点。因此,一个关于"软件工程历史"的研讨会只能作为一个起点,为人们提供一个到目前为止都完成了哪些工作的概述以及指出将来要研究的重要议题是什么。
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