Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software

by Scott Rosenberg

The divisions that arose in Rome, along with a debate about the need for an international software engineering institute, led one participant, an IBM programmer named Tom Simpson, to write a satire titled “Masterpiece Engineering.” Simpson imagined a conference in the year 1500 trying to “scientificize” the production of art masterpieces, attempting to specify the criteria for creation of the Mona Lisa, and establishing an institute to promote the more efficient production of great paintings. They set about equipping the masterpiece workers with some more efficient tools to help them create masterpieces. They invented power-driven chisels, automatic paint tube squeezers and so on…. Production was still not reaching satisfactory levels…. Two weeks at the Institute were spent in counting the number of brush strokes per day produced by one group of painters, and this criterion was then promptly applied in assessing the value to the enterprise of the rest. If a painter failed to turn in his twenty brush strokes per day he was clearly underproductive. Regrettably none of these advances in knowledge seemed to have any real impact on masterpiece production and so, at length, the group decided that the basic difficulty was clearly a management problem. One of the brighter students (by the name of L. da Vinci) was instantly promoted to manager of the project, putting him in charge of procuring paints, canvases and brushes for the rest of the organisation. Simpson’s spoof of the Rom...