But what of the other workers who would use the machine then and
on subsequent occasions to embroider the logo onto shirts, caps, and so on? Have they
become de-skilled like the workers in Fritz Lang??™s Metropolis, little more than
automatons pushing the buttons and pulling the levers of a machine? Far from it! Their
skills are still very much in demand, working with the customer to choose the right
material, color, size, and placement of the logo. If people with no aesthetic skills were
let loose with the machine, all we would have would be the ability to produce terriblelooking
clothes very quickly.
The important role of design is thus still present: only the tedious, time-consuming,
and error-prone task of turning that design into ?¬?nished product is automated. The
same is true for the modelers in DSM: if we let people with no abstract thinking or
analytical skills loose with aDSMtool, the code produced may be notionally bug-free
thanks to the modeling language rules and the generator, but the resulting system will
be unlikely to do anything useful.
The idea of DSM is thus not to replace developers with generators, but to enable
those same developers to produce the same systems faster, more reliably and with
higher quality. That after all is the problem of the software crisis: our projects are late
(or fail) and contain too many bugs.
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