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Richard W. Selby

Director of Engineering

Northrop Grumman

Adjunct Professor

University of Southern California

Barry Boehm

Contributions

Summary

November 9, 2022

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Biography of Barry W. Boehm: Positions and Education

Barry W. Boehm was the TRW Professor of Software Engineering in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, California. He was also the Director of the Center for Systems and Software Engineering at USC. He was a professor at USC since 1993.
From 1989 to 1992, he served within the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) as Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Science and Technology Office and as Director of the Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E) Software and Computer Technology Office
From 1973 to 1989, he worked at TRW culminating as Chief Scientist of the Defense Systems Group
From 1959 to 1973, he worked at the Rand Corporation culminating as Head of the Information Sciences Department, and from 1955 to 1959, he was a Programmer-Analyst at General Dynamics
He received his B.A. degree from Harvard in 1957 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA in 1961 and 1964, all in Mathematics. He also received an honorary Sc.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts in 2000.

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Biography of Barry W. Boehm: Projects and Activities

Led collaborative research activities with over 30 industry and government affiliate organizations and taught software engineering
Provided program office support to large future software-intensive systems-of-systems such as the Army FCS

DARPA

Managed acquisition of over $1 billion in advanced technology including DARPA’s contributions to the ARPAnet and Internet, supercomputing, applied AI, software development and reuse environments, large-scale virtual reality simulators, and sponsorship of the SEI

DDR&E

Led efforts to improve software development including CMM policies and co-led the software development standard that became IEEE-EIA Joint Standard 016 Standard for Information Technology - Software Life Cycle Processes - Software Development - Acquirer-Supplier Agreement

Served in several leadership positions and conducted engineering and management reviews of large aerospace and commercial systems

Rand

Led major Air Force command and control mission analyses such as the Command & Control Information Processing 1985 (CCIP-85) study

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Biography of Barry W. Boehm: Boards and Committees

Barry served on the boards of several scientific journals including the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Computer, IEEE Software, ACM Computing Reviews, Automated Software Engineering, Software Process, and Information and Software Technology
He served as:

Chair of the AIAA Technical Committee on Computer Systems
Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Software Engineering
Member of the Governing Board of the IEEE Computer Society
Chair of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board’s Information Technology Panel
Chair of the NASA Research and Technology Advisory Committee for Guidance, Control, and Information Processing
Chair of the Board of Visitors for the CMU Software Engineering Institute

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Biography of Barry W. Boehm: Honors and Awards

Guest Lecturer of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1970)
AIAA Information Systems Award (1979)
J.D. Warnier Prize for Excellence in Information Sciences (1984)
ISPA Freiman Award for Parametric Analysis (1988)
NSIA Grace Murray Hopper Award (1989)
Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence (1992)
ASQC Lifetime Achievement Award (1994)
ACM Distinguished Research Award in Software Engineering (1997)
IEEE Harlan D. Mills Award (2000)
Visiting Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2005)
Fellow of the primary professional societies in

Computing (ACM)
Aerospace (AIAA)
Electronics (IEEE)
Systems engineering (INCOSE)

Member of the National Academy of Engineering

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“Software and Its Impact: A Quantitative Assessment” (1973)

Barry led 1971-72 study for the Air Force called “Command and Control Information Processing – 1985” (CCIP-85)
Software technology served as the critical technology the Air Force would need to achieve its 1985 command and control objectives
Software costs exceeded hardware costs by at least 2:1 and up to 7:1 for major government and commercial systems

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“Software and Its Impact: A Quantitative Assessment” (1973) (cont.)

Barry circulated a “software quiz” to engage key stakeholders and gain their attention by having them attempt to answer simple questions about where software developers spend most of their effort and experience most of their errors

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“Software Engineering Economics” (1981)

Barry defined economics as the study of how people make decisions in resource-limited situations and applied this to software
For example, developers never have enough time or money to incorporate all the good features they want, and they must design software products that operate within a world of limited computer power, memory, and storage

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“Software Engineering Economics” (1981) (cont.)

Barry emphasized the importance of analyzing risks, their impacts, and the time-value of information
COCOMO defined a scaling model that integrates product size and phase-sensitive multipliers for cost driver attributes
COCOMO provided an approach for understanding the cost consequences of software decision-making as well as sensitivity analysis and tradeoff analysis

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“Improving Software Productivity” (1987)

Barry defined the productivity of a process as the outputs produced by the process divided by the inputs consumed by the process
His comparisons of actual productivity rates across projects substantiated the COCOMO productivity multiplier factors of 4.18 due to personnel/team capability etc.
He emphasized the multi-dimensional nature of and the interdependencies among software quality, effort, and schedule attributes and the need for modeling frameworks

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“Improving Software Productivity” (1987) (cont.)

Barry described productivity opportunities: get the best from people, make steps more efficient, eliminate steps, eliminate rework, build simpler products, and reuse components
Improved software productivity is not an end in itself; it is a means of helping people expand their capabilities to use information, make better decisions, and increase effectiveness and efficiency

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“A Spiral Model of Software Development and Enhancement” (1988)

Spiral Model and Concurrent Engineering

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Theory W: WinWin Achievement Theorem

Making winners of your success-critical stakeholders requires:

Identifying all of the success-critical stakeholders (SCSs).
Understanding how the SCSs want to win.
Having the SCSs negotiate a win-win set of product and process plans.
Controlling progress toward SCS win-win realization, including adaptation to change.

“Theory W Software Project Management: Principles and Examples” (1989)

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“Managing Software Productivity and Reuse” (1999)

Barry identified three strategies for improving productivity: (a) Work faster by using tools that automate or speed up previously labor-intensive tasks (8% gain). (b) Work smarter by using process improvements that avoid or reduce non-value-adding tasks (17% gain). (c) Avoid unnecessary work by reusing software artifacts instead of custom developing each project artifact (47% gain).

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“Software Economics: A Roadmap” (2000)

Barry articulated that software design and engineering serve as investment activities that focus on creating maximal value for a given investment
Better decision-making serves as the key enabler of greater value creation, such as decisions about structuring phased projects, designing for change, and entering new markets

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“Early Experiences in Software Economics” (2002)

Barry’s early fundamental idea was that getting a software system’s economic and systems analyses right were at least as important as getting its programming right
Requirements/design phases inserted the bulk of the serious software defects but developers did not eliminate them until testing phases when they were much more expensive to fix
Challenge is to selectively prune the parts of the software experience base that become less relevant and to conserve and build on the parts with lasting value for the future

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Pareto 80-20 Distribution of �Test Case Value

Actual business value

% of

Value

for

Correct

Customer

Billing

Customer Type

100

Automated test

generation tool

% of

Value

for

Correct

Customer

Billing

Customer Type

100

Automated test

generation tool

all tests have equal value*

*Usual SW assumption for all requirements, objects, defects, …

“Value-Based Software Engineering” (2006)

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Initial VBSE Theory: 4+1 Process�– With a great deal of concurrency and backtracking

“Value-Based Software Engineering” (2006)

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“Incremental Commitment Model” (2014):�Single Increment View

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“Incremental Commitment Life Cycle Process” (2014)

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Barry Boehm’s Approach to Systems and Software Engineering

Studies actual systems
Generalizes ideas to enable transferability
Leverages data
Builds models
Articulates using high degree of insightfulness and clarity
Creates research that has timeless value
Collaborates across many organizations
Bridges across industry and academia
Exercises “convening power”
Engages with openness
Achieves objectivity and drives leadership