In October 1968, about forty academics and industry practitioners met in Garmisch, Germany, for a conference sponsored by the NATO Science Committee. The meeting ran from the 7th to the 11th of October. Its chairman was F. L. Bauer, with L. Bolliet and H. J. Helms as co-chairmen. The published report was edited by Peter Naur and Brian Randell.
The conference was deliberately given a provocative title. Organizers chose the phrase “software engineering” to express the hope that building software could become a disciplined activity grounded in engineering principles, rather than the ad hoc craft it often was at the time.
Participants spoke frankly about how often large software projects ran late, exceeded their budgets, and shipped with serious defects. These candid discussions gave wide currency to the idea of a “software crisis” and made the report a foundational document for the field.
Edsger Dijkstra, who attended, later recalled in his 1972 Turing Award lecture “The Humble Programmer” that the software crisis was officially recognized at the Garmisch conference. The meeting is now treated as a turning point that named both the problem and the proposed discipline for addressing it.