Software engineering as a radical novelty

摘要

"It takes …15 to 20 years to mature a [software] technology to the point that it can be popularized and disseminated to the community at large" [10]. Education typically bears a large share of the blame. This paper critically examines education's role in the U.S. Air Force's 1980s insertion of Ada and Ada software engineering. It concludes that our principal error in the process was a failure to define "education" in a broad enough sense, to consider the educational needs of the corporate Air Force ("institutional education") as well as those of the individuals in it. Lessons learned are summarized for application to future technology insertion efforts.