The use and abuse of a software engineering system

Abstract

In 1969, International Computers Limited of England set about the design of its 2900 Series which was to unify the primary thrust of the company and was to provide a hardware and software architecture which was, at least, state-of-the-art. 1 The systems also had to sell. Therefore, they had to satisfy the then market requirement for rich facilities and generally neat features. If ICL was seriously to compete with IBM (in Europe at least) the operating system, subsequently called System VME/B, would have to be comparable with the IBM products. ICL could not afford the staggering investments made in the 360 software systems. On the other hand, its recent track record had been less than outstanding for such software development. Faced with this dilemma, a project was set up to develop a system capable of minimizing the problems of software development by harnessing many of the current software engineering philosophies in order to aid management, reduce error rate and increase productivity. This system was subsequently called CADES (Computer Aided Development and Evaluation Systems). This paper describes briefly the major facets of this system and then goes on to discuss six years of product development experience with a software engineering system which was, by the standards of the day, state-of-the-art.