on a conference sponsored by the NATO

2 The present report is available from: Scientific Affairs Division NATO Brussels 39 Belgium Note for the current edition: The version of this report that you are reading was prepared by scanning the original edition, conversion to text through OCR, and then reformatting. Every effort has been made to do this as accurately as possible. However, it is almost certain that some errors have crept in despite best efforts. One of the problems was that the OCR software used kept trying to convert the original British spellings of words like 'realise' to the American spelling 'realize' and made other stupid mistakes. Whenever the OCR program was unsure of a reading, it called it to the attention of the operator, but there were a number of occasions in which it was sure, but wrong. Not all of these instances are guaranteed to have been caught. Although the editor tried to conform to the original presentation, certain changes were necessary, such as pagination. In order that the original Table of Contents and Indices would not have to be recalculated, an artifice was used. That is the original page breaks are indicated in the text thusly: 49 indicates that this is the point at which page 49 began in the original edition. If two such indicators appear together, this shows that there was a blank page in the original. The figures have been redrawn to improve legibility. The original size and scale was not changed. In order to accommodate the new pagination, the figures may have been shifted slightly from their position in the original document. Finally, it should be noted that the effort required to produce the current edition was a tiny fraction of the effort required for the original. The current editor therefore wants to express his appreciation to the original editors, Peter Naur and Brian Randell, for producing what was clearly a landmark effort in the Software Engineering field. HIGHLIGHTS The present report is concerned with a problem crucial to the use of computers, viz. the so-called software, or programs , developed to control their action. The report summarises the discussions at a Working Conference on Software Engineering, sponsored by the NATO Science Committee. The Conference was attended by more than fifty people, from eleven different countries, all concerned professionally with software, either as users, manufacturers, or teachers at universities. The discussions cover all aspects of software including • relation …