Annotated Bibliography and References - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 434

Tom Gilb and Dorothy Graham, as well as several other authors, studied the
inspection methodology and wrote books about it. This topic was chosen for this
bibliography for international reasons, because it is popular in Europe. (Tom lives
in Norway.)
For more than four decades, formal inspections have been the top-ranked meth-
od of removing defects in terms of defect removal efficiency. Inspections aver-
age about 85% of removal efficiency, or more than twice the average efficiency of
most forms of testing. This topic is a solid introduction to a topic that every soft-
ware engineer, and in fact every reader of this topic, should know about.
Glass, R. L. Software Runaways: Lessons Learned from Massive Software
Project Failures . Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1998.
As major software projects began to top 10,000 function points and one million
source code statements in the 1970s, they began to experience severe problems
with cost and schedule overruns and outright cancellation due to negative returns
on investment. These problems remain chronic and endemic problems of software
engineering even today. This useful book by Bob Glass examines a number of
famous failures and explains what went wrong.
For example, the failure of the Denver airport luggage-handling system is a mi-
crocosm of large-system mistakes, including optimistic estimates; poor architec-
ture and design; arbitrary schedules; poor change control; poor quality control; and
very poor and even deceitful status tracking.
Humphrey, Watts. Managing the Software Process . Addison-Wesley, Read-
ing, MA, 1989.
This is yet another software engineering classic by a famous software engin-
eering expert. Watts Humphrey had a long and successful career at IBM. He was
IBM's Director of Software and introduced many important process improve-
ments.
Watts then moved to the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), where he pion-
eered the famous capability maturity model. Watts also developed the team soft-
ware process (TSP), which is one of the strong quality methods used successfully
on large and complex applications.
Overall, Watts had a multidecade impact, starting with IBM in the 1960s and
continuing through the SEI era of the 1980s and up through the 2000 era. Watts
is the author of many more books, but this one was selected because it has been
influential for more than two decades.