Barry W. Boehm is known for many contributions to software engineering. He was the first to identify software as the primary expense of future computer systems, he developed COCOMO, the spiral model, wideband delphi, and many more contributions through his involvement in industry and academia.

In an important report to DARPA (year?), Boehm predicted that software costs would overwhelm hardware costs. DARPA had expected him to predict that hardware would remain the biggest problem, encouraging them to invest in even larger computers. The report inspired a change of direction in computing.

Software economics

Barry Boehm's book Software Engineering Economics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ : Prentice-Hall, 1981 ISBN 0-13-822122-7) documents his Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO). It relates software development effort for a program, in man-years T, to source lines of code (SLOC). 1981 (MCMLXXXI) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... COCOMO is a model designed by Barry Boehm to give an estimate of the number of programmer-months it will take to develop a software product. ...

T = k * (SLOC)^{(1 + x)}

For a single software developer, k can be factored out by using more than 1 SLOC data point. In this case, x can be a fraction like 0.1 or 0.25.

• Note: since man-years are not interchangeable with years, Brooks' Law applies:
  • Adding programmers to a late project makes it later.
  • Thus this formula is best applied to stable software development teams which have completed multiple projects.

Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr. ...

Spiral model

Boehm also created the spiral model of software development, in which the phases of development are repeatedly revisited. This iterative software development process influenced MBASE and extreme programming. The spiral model is a software development process combining elements of both design and prototyping-in-stages, in an effort to combine advantages of top-down and bottom-up concepts. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... In software engineering, Model-Based Architecting and Software Engineering (MBASE) is a software development process developed by Barry Boehm and Dan Port in the late 1990s. ... Extreme Programming (XP) is a software engineering methodology, the most prominent of several agile software development methodologies. ...

Wideband Delphi

Boehm refined the Delphi method of estimation to include more group iteration, making it more suitable for certain classes of problems, such as software development. This variant is called the Wideband Delphi method. // The Delphi method and consensus building The Delphi method is a technique aimed at building an agreement, or consensus about an opinion or view, without necessarily having people meet face to face, such as through surveys, questionaires, emails etc. ... The Wideband Delphi estimation method is a consensus-based estimation technique for estimating effort. ...

Education

Dr. Boehm received his B.A. degree from Harvard University in 1957, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA in 1961 and 1964, all in Mathematics. A Bachelor of Arts (B.A. or A.B.) is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for a course or program in the arts and/or sciences. ... Harvard University campus (old map) Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is an accredited private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ... A masters degree is an academic degree usually awarded for completion of a postgraduate course of one or two years in duration. ... Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. ... The University of California, Los Angeles, popularly known as UCLA, is a public, coeducational university situated in the neighborhood of Westwood within the city of Los Angeles. ... Euclid, a famous Greek mathematician known as the father of geometry, is shown here in detail from The School of Athens by Raphael. ...

Career

Boehm has worked as educator and researcher for many years. Boehm worked at RAND, TRW Inc., DARPA, and is currently TRW Professor of Software Engineering, Computer Science Department, and Director, USC Center for Software Engineering. RAND Headquarters The RAND Corporation is a global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces. ... TRW Incorporated was an American corporation involved in a number of businesses, mostly defense-related, but including automotive supply and credit reporting. ... The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military. ... Edward L. Doheny Jr. ...

Awards

Recent awards include the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence (1992), the ASQC Lifetime Achievement Award (1994), and the ACM Distinguished Research Award in Software Engineering (1997). He is an AIAA Fellow, an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He received the Mellon Award for Excellence in Mentoring [1] on Tuesday, April 19, 2005. The acronym ASQ stands for: American Society for Quality (http://www. ... The Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM, was founded in 1947 as the worlds first scientific and educational computing society. ... The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) is the scholarly society for the field of aerospace engineering. ... The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or IEEE (pronounced as eye-triple-ee) is an international non-profit, professional organization incorporated in the State of New York, United States. ... Founded in 1964, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in the United States provides engineering leadership in service to the nation. ...