1.3 Software Crisis
What is Software Crisis?
Computer systems were very new and primitive in early fifties and the use of software was also very limited at that time. It was limited to some scientific applications or used to process the data of census. In 1960s a great amount of rapid improvement was made in hardware. New hardware and new computer systems were made available. These computer systems were far more powerful than the computers of early fifties. It is all
relative, the computers of 1960s are primitive as compare to the computers we have these days but were far more powerful than the computers of early fifties. More powerful hardware resulted into the development of more powerful and complex software. Those very complex software was very difficult to write. So the tools and techniques that were used for less complex software became inapplicable for the more complex software. Lets try to understand this with the help of an example.
Let’s imagine a person who use to live in a village and who have constructed a hut for him to live. Definitely he should have face some problems in the beginning but was managed to build a hurt for him. Now if you ask him to construct another hut, he may be able to construct one more easily and in a better way. This new hut may be better than the first one and he may construct it in a relatively less time. But if you ask him to construct concrete and iron houses then he may not be able to handle it. Since he made a hut and he
know how to make a place to live so you may expect from him to build concrete and iron buildings. If this is the case then you should all agree that the building constructed by that person will not have a stable structure or he may not even be able to build one.
In early 60s software had suffered from the similar kind of problem to which we call Software Crisis. Techniques that were used to develop small software were not applicable for large software systems. This thing resulted in the following consequences.
More Complex Software Applications
This conception is also very common these days. People think that if one knows how to
code then that’s sufficient. But just writing code is not the whole story. People have
realized this fact way back in 1960s that only coding is not sufficient to develop software
systems, we also need to apply engineering principles.
What is Software Crisis?
Computer systems were very new and primitive in early fifties and the use of software was also very limited at that time. It was limited to some scientific applications or used to process the data of census. In 1960s a great amount of rapid improvement was made in hardware. New hardware and new computer systems were made available. These computer systems were far more powerful than the computers of early fifties. It is all
relative, the computers of 1960s are primitive as compare to the computers we have these days but were far more powerful than the computers of early fifties. More powerful hardware resulted into the development of more powerful and complex software. Those very complex software was very difficult to write. So the tools and techniques that were used for less complex software became inapplicable for the more complex software. Lets try to understand this with the help of an example.
Let’s imagine a person who use to live in a village and who have constructed a hut for him to live. Definitely he should have face some problems in the beginning but was managed to build a hurt for him. Now if you ask him to construct another hut, he may be able to construct one more easily and in a better way. This new hut may be better than the first one and he may construct it in a relatively less time. But if you ask him to construct concrete and iron houses then he may not be able to handle it. Since he made a hut and he
know how to make a place to live so you may expect from him to build concrete and iron buildings. If this is the case then you should all agree that the building constructed by that person will not have a stable structure or he may not even be able to build one.
In early 60s software had suffered from the similar kind of problem to which we call Software Crisis. Techniques that were used to develop small software were not applicable for large software systems. This thing resulted in the following consequences.
- In most of the cases that software which was tried to be build using those old tools and techniques were not complete.
- Most of the times it was delivered too late.
- Most of the projects were over-budgeted.
- And in most of the case systems build using these techniques were not reliable –meaning that they were not be able to do what they were expected to do.
More Complex Software Applications
This conception is also very common these days. People think that if one knows how to
code then that’s sufficient. But just writing code is not the whole story. People have
realized this fact way back in 1960s that only coding is not sufficient to develop software
systems, we also need to apply engineering principles.
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