Software in Perspective

The “Software Crisis” Term coined in the mid 1970s During the 1970s, for the first time, software maintenance costs exceeded development costs Since then hardware costs have dramatically declined and software costs have risen The number of projects that failed because of software became significant, a trend that continues today

Initial Efforts to Deal with the Software Crisis Better Programming Languages (e.g., ADA) Formal Specification Languages (e.g., HAL/S) CASE Tools These resulted in relatively minor improvements (i.e., No Silver Bullet)

Recent Attempts to Resolve the “Software Crisis” Formal Proofs of Correctness Independent Verification and Validation Software Quality Assurance The Cleanroom Process

The Nature of Software “Now that the Software Crisis will soon celebrate its silver anniversary, it’s time we recognized that this is not a crisis, it’s a situation: software has bugs. It is in its nature to have bugs, and that fact is unlikely to change soon.” - L. R. Weiner

Software Process Improvement (SPI) Initiatives “The quality of a product is directly related to the quality of the process used to create it.” – W. E. Demming SEI Capability Maturity Model (CMM or CMMI) ISO SPICE Bootstrap ISO 9000-3 TickIT Trillium

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