Talk:Software crisis

Unsuitable
Erm, this page is not in suitable shape, methinks. Brent Gulanowski 00:46, 27 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Text removed: Try http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%22software+crisis%22&btnG=Google+Search and try to summarize them

The roots of the software crisis are complexity, expectations, and change.

See software engineering.

Indeed, the problem of trying to write an encyclopedia is very much like writing software. Both running code and a hypertext/encyclopedia are wonderful turn-ons for the brain, and you want more of it the more you see, like a drug. As a user, you want it to do everything, as a customer you don't really want to pay for it, and as a producer you realize how unrealistic the customers are. Requirements will conflict in functionality vs affordability, and in completeness (get everything in) vs timeliness (meet the deadline).

The notion of a software crisis emerged at the end of the 1960s. An early use of the term is in Edsger Dijkstra's ACM Turing Award Lecture, "The Humble Programmer" (EWD340), given in 1972 and published in the Communications of the ACM. Dijkstra says,


 * [The major cause of the software crisis is] that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic problem. [ Edsger Dijkstra: The Humble Programmer [PDF, 473Kb]]

- SV (talk) 23:08, 19 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The use of the past tense is incorrect in this article
All the problems of the software crisis still exist across the software industry.

I think this article should be revised to use the present tense, or at least to indicate that the problems are still in evidence across the industry.

Birtej (talk) 14:11, 22 February 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree. I am writing a thesis which touches on this subject, and I'd like to give this article a rework when I'm done with writing my thesis.—greenrd (talk) 20:30, 22 February 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree. Maybe it was more popular in the past - I'm not sure. But I'm sure that it was popular term in my University (6 years ago). During "Software engineering" lectures there ware examples from today's life not from the past. CoperNick (talk) 08:59, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Copyright problem removed
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 * Note this was virtually the entire history section. Voceditenore (talk) 13:40, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Claim not backed up by citation
According to the article, "The term 'software crisis' was coined by F. L. Bauer at the first NATO Software Engineering Conference in 1968 at Garmisch, Germany." The statement is followed by a reference, but the reference does not back up the statement. Instead, the reference states that F. L. Bauer coined the term "software engineering", not the term "software crisis". The term "software crisis" only appears once in the reference, and is attributed to "some": "This was as participants came to realize the degree of common concern about what some were even willing to term the 'software crisis'..."

I am removing the claim that F. L. Bauer coined the term "software crisis" because the references don't provide any evidence to back it up. The source currently being used clearly does not attribute the term to F. L. Bauer. --JHP (talk) 02:39, 19 October 2011 (UTC)


 * 13 years later this page still has his picture, despite Bauer not being once mentioned in the article. Karton Realista (talk) 10:47, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

The "crisis" was before the invention object oriented languages
The software crisis was a milestone in the history of programming language that is mostly ignored in programming classes.

But it was actually before the invention of object oriented language, which solved many problems. Why isn't this mentioned here?

Also it's unclear why I can read so many facts about the software crisis in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component-based_software_engineering (but not here), where it says:


 * ''The idea that software should be componentized - built from prefabricated components - first became prominent with Douglas McIlroy's address at the NATO conference on software engineering in Garmisch, Germany, 1968, titled Mass Produced Software Components.[3] The conference set out to counter the so-called software crisis. McIlroy's subsequent inclusion of pipes and filters into the Unix operating system was the first implementation of an infrastructure for this idea.
 * ''Brad Cox of Stepstone largely defined the modern concept of a software component.[4] He called them Software ICs and set out to create an infrastructure and market for these components by inventing the Objective-C programming language. (He summarizes this view in his book Object-Oriented Programming - An Evolutionary Approach 1986.)

You should include these facts into this article because they are most important.

I also disagree that today's software projects have the same problems as back in those days, because todays programming languages are usually object oriented.

The reasons for todays software problems are rather when programmers don't know what they're writing. Also by using overheaded copy-paste-code from other people (often called "frameworks"...instead of "workcrap"). Okey, that's often the case, I must sadely admit...especially when programmers want to write programs without dealing with code. --178.197.228.13 (talk) 16:48, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Very stubby
There have been many improvements to languages and their ecosystems, too many to pick a single one. And in imho, OOP alone is too inflexible for most complex problems, compared to composite pattern or duck typing. And such technical improvements can only be a supportive factor for the solution of this crisis, not a solution on their own. I'd recommend rewriting this. Markus.lautenbach (talk) 00:10, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Agree
I have not come across this term for decades. The software crisis seems to have been largely a quantitative problem. Even though the use of computers has gone up dramatically, there are now millions of trained developers. Most of them work on web sites and mobile aps where the impact of bugs is less. There have been many improvements and software testing is an important one. On the other hand, software verification as proposed by Dijkstra and Hoare has not been widely adopted, and software bugs still cause problems. There is now an army of people sometimes called 'hackers' who try to exploit the smallest holes.

The Dutch Volkskrant newspaper mentions the large fraction of big development projects that never become used, when that has decreased from 90 % to less than 50 % and many projects cost barely 2 times the original price and time.

Dan Oom (talk) 10:41, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

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