CHRONICLE - WATTS HUMPHREY

Watts Humphrey

 American physicist, mathematician, and consultant, born in Battle Creek, Michigan on July 4, 1927, well known and exalted thinker in the world of software engineering.

Humphrey as a child had difficulty learning to read. His father, also named Watts, along with the family moved to New England and enrolled his eldest child and his namesake in a school where he could get help with reading. Humphrey, who later learned that he had dyslexia, graduated as valedictorian of his high school class. After serving in the United States Navy, Humphrey earned a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Chicago. He subsequently completed a master's degree in physics from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Humphrey met his wife, Barbara, while working for Sylvania in Boston, they were married in 1954, and had seven children and 11 grandchildren.

In the 1960s, Humphrey led the IBM software team that introduced the first software license. Humphrey was also vice president of the IBM company.

In the 1980s, at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Humphrey founded the Software Process Program, and served as director of this program from 1986 until the early 1990s. software engineering process, because it was in this that large and small organizations found the most serious difficulties, and where the greatest opportunities for improvement lay, the program resulted in the creation of the Capability and Maturity Model, published in 1989 in Humphrey's book "Managing the Software Process", which in turn inspired the development of the Personal Software Process (PSP) and the Team Software Process (TSP). His personal objective was still to "improve the quality and productivity in software development to alleviate the so-called Software Crisis".

In 1995, he wrote “A Discipline for Software Engineering”, later in 1997 he wrote “Managing Technical People - Innovation, Teamwork and Software Process”, in 1999 he wrote “Introduction to the Team Software Process”, and in 2001 he wrote “Winning with Software: An Executive Strategy”, after these personal works he was awarded in 2003 with the National Medal of Technology, which he received from President George W. Bush in a special ceremony at the White House in 2005.

In 2005 he continued with his books and wrote "PSP, A Self-Improvement Process for Software Engineers", and in 2006 he wrote two books: "TSP, Leading a Development Team" and the book "TSP, Coaching Development Teams".

Finally, in 2010 he received the Steves Awards and wrote "Reflections on Management: How to Manage Your Software Projects, Your Teams, Your Boss, and Yourself".

he died in Sarasota, Florida on October 28, 2010 at age 83.

Posthumously, the IEEE and the Software Engineering Institute renamed the previously named “Software Process Achievement Award” into the “Watts S. Humphrey Software Process Achievement (SPA) Award”, which recognizes organizations around the world that have implemented outstanding improvements in the quality of the software and its processes.

The Watts Humphrey Software Quality Institute in Chennai, India is named after him