Software as Labor Process

For almost as long as there has been software, there has been a software crisis.1 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. The acute shortage of programmers that caused “software turmoil” in the early 1960s has reappeared as a “world-wide shortage of information technology workers”2 in the 1990s. Thirty years after the first NATO Conference on Software Engineering, advocates of an industrial approach to software development still complain that the “vast majority of computer code is still handcrafted from raw programming languages by artisans using techniques they neither measure nor are able to repeat consistently.”3 Corporate managers and government officials release ominous warnings about the desperate state of the software industry with almost ritualistic regularity. The Y2K crisis is only the most recent manifestation of the software industry’s apparent predilection for apocalyptic rhetoric.

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