Chapter 1. Introduction

Organizations want systems. They don't want processes, meetings, models, documents, or even code.^[1] They want systems that work as quickly as possible, as cheaply as possible, and as easy to change as possible. Organizations don't want long software development lead-times and high costs; they just want to reduce systems development hassles to the absolute minimum.

^[1] Robert Block began his book The Politics of Projects[1] in a similar manner.

But systems development is a complicated business. It demands distillation of overlapping and contradictory requirements; invention of good abstractions from those requirements; fabrication of an efficient, cost-effective implementation; and clever solutions to isolated coding and abstraction problems. And we need to manage all this work to a successful conclusion, all at the lowest possible cost in time and money.

None of this is new. Over thirty years ago, the U.S. Department of Defense warned of a "software crisis" and predicted that to meet the burgeoning need for software by the end of the century, everyone in the country would have to become a programmer. In many ways this prediction has come true, as anyone who has checked on the progress of a flight or made a stock trade using the Internet can tell you. Nowadays, we all write our own programs by filling in forms at the level of abstraction of the application, not the software.