Many people are aware that in 1968 an inaugural conference in Software Engineering was held in Garmisch, Germany under the auspices of NATO, and that a follow-up conference was organised the next year, 1969 in Rome, Italy.
Although the reports from those two conferences are reasonably well distributed, if not perhaps as well read, there exists an appendix that the report editor, Brian Randell, notes:
Unlike the first conference, at which it was fully accepted that the term software engineering
expressed a need rather than a reality, in Rome there was already a slight tendency to talk as
if the subject already existed. And it became clear during the conference that the organizers
had a hidden agenda, namely that of persuading NATO to fund the setting up of an International
Software Engineering Institute. However things did not go according to their plan.
The discussion sessions which were meant to provide evidence of strong and extensive support
for this proposal were instead marked by considerable scepticism, and led one of the
participants, Tom Simpson of IBM, to write a splendid short satire on 'Masterpiece Engineering'.
John and I later decided that Tom Simpson's text would provide an appropriate, albeit somewhat
irreverent, set of concluding remarks to the main part of the report. However we were in the
event 'persuaded' by the conference organizers to excise this text from the report. This was,
I am sure, solely because of its sarcastic references to a 'Masterpiece Engineering Institute'.
I have always regretted that we gave in to the pressure and allowed our report to be censored
in such a fashion.
There were no further conferences, and the proposed Software Engineering Institute was not funded by NATO.
T. H. Simpson
IBM Corporation,
Wheaton, Maryland
You may be interested in an experience I had last night while I was trying to prepare some remarks for this address. I was walking outside in the garden attempting to organize my thoughts when I stumbled over a stone in the ground. To my surprise as I picked myself up I saw that it had an inscription chiselled into it. With some difficulty I deciphered it; it began
"Here on this spot in the year 1500 an International Conference was held".
It seems that a group of people had gotten together to discuss the problems posed by the numbers of art masterpieces being fabricated throughout the world; at that time it was a very flourishing industry. They thought it would be appropriate to find out if this process could be "scientificized" so they held the "International Working Conference on Masterpiece Engineering" to discuss the problem.
As I continued walking round the garden, now looking a little closer at the ground, I came across the bones of a group, still in session, attempting to write down the criteria for the design of the "Mona Lisa". The sight reminded me strangely of our group working on the criteria for the design of an operating system.
Apparently the Conference decided that it should establish an Institute to work in more detail on production problems in the masterpiece field. So they went out into the streets of Rome and solicited a few chariot drivers, gladiators and others and put them through a five week (half-day) masterpiece creation course; then they were all put into a large room and asked to begin creating.
They soon realized that they weren't getting much efficiency out of the Institute, so they set about equipping the masterpiece workers with some more efficient tools to help them create masterpieces. They invented power-driven chisels, automatic paint tube squeezers and so on but all this merely produced a loud outcry from the educators: "All these techniques will give the painters sloppy characteristics", they said.
Production was still not reaching satisfactory levels so they extended the range of masterpiece support techniques with some further steps. One idea was to take a single canvas and pass it rapidly from painter to painter. While one was applying the brush the others had time to think.
The next natural step to take was, of course, to double the number of painters but before taking it they adopted a most interesting device. They decided to carry out some proper measurement of productivity. Two weeks at the Institute were spent in counting the number of brush strokes per day produced by one group of painters, and this criterion was then promptly applied in assessing the value to the enterprise of the rest. If a painter failed to turn in his twenty brush strokes per day he was clearly under-productive.
Regrettably none of these advances in knowledge seemed to have any real impact on masterpiece production and so, at length, the group decided that the basic difficulty was clearly a management problem. One of the brighter students (by the name of L. da Vinci) was instantly promoted to manager of the project, putting him in charge of procuring paints, canvases and brushes for the rest of the organisation.
Well, for all I know, the Institute may still be in existence. I leave you with one thought: in a few hundred years, somebody may unearth our tape recordings on this spot and find us equally ridiculous.