Remembering Humphrey Watts: Father of Capability Maturity Model and a Man of "Outrageous Commitment"

Humphrey Watts, the founder of Capability Maturity Model (CMM) at Software Engineering Institute, CMU, died on 28th October 2010. The following are excerpts from a memorial article that appeared on the site of Software Engineering Institute in his memory....

"When Watts Humphrey arrived at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in 1986, he made what he called an “outrageous commitment to change the world of software engineering.”

By all accounts, he succeeded.

During his tenure at the SEI, he established the Software Process Program, led development of the Software Capability Maturity Model, and introduced the Software Process Assessment and Software Capability Evaluation methods. These later became the basis for the development of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), a framework of software engineering best practices that has been adopted by thousands or organizations throughout the world. Humphrey also led the development of the Personal Software Process (PSP) and the Team Software Process (TSP). In 2005 Humphrey received the National Medal of Technology, the highest honor awarded by the President of the United States to America’s leading innovators.

Humphrey, 83, died Thursday, October 28, 2010 at his home in Sarasota, Florida.   

“Watts Humphrey was one of the icons of software engineering--one of a handful of engineers like Barry Boehm, Fred Brooks, and Vic Basili who have helped define this young field," said SEI director and CEO Dr. Paul Nielsen.  "Watts brought engineering to software engineering.  His work has had immeasurable impact on the global software community, tirelessly urging the community to emphasize quality, measurement, and performance."

Known as the “Father of Software Quality” Humphrey dedicated the majority of his career to addressing problems in software development including schedule delays, cost increases, performance problems, and defects. 

“He was a wonderful leader and a wonderful man. He set forth an energizing goal and an inspiring mission that we all wanted to be a part of,” said Anita Carleton, director of the SEI’s Software Engineering Process Management (SEPM) Program, who was initially hired by Humphrey. “He was my lifelong mentor and my boss.” 

When he arrived at the SEI, Humphrey worked to clarify that process. 

“Changing the world of anything is an outrageous personal commitment. That’s what makes it outrageous. I felt it needed to be done. I knew I couldn’t do it alone, and I wanted an environment where I could work with folks and do that,” Humphrey explained in the 2010 interview.

Larry Druffel, SEI director and CEO from 1986 to 1996, said that when Humphrey arrived at the SEI, he came with a vision based on his work at IBM; software could be managed by process.

“We all understood the importance of things like version control, configuration management and methodology, but I don’t think anyone knew how to put those into a transferable form,” Druffel said. “Not everybody thought that it was a good idea at the time, but he was persistent, and he was proven right. It could have died easily after several iterations. There were enough people out there criticizing it. But he stayed with it and he made it work.”

Working with a team, Humphrey identified characteristics of best practices in software engineering that began to lay the groundwork for what would eventually become the Software Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and, eventually, CMMI.
Druffel nominated Humphrey to be the first ever SEI Fellow, a designation awarded to people who have made an outstanding commitment to the work of the SEI, and who continue to advise SEI leadership on key issues.

“After we named him fellow, I said ‘Watts, you can work on anything that you want to.’ He said ‘I’ve always believed we can provide statistical control to what the individual software engineer does,’” Druffel explained. "

Remembering him for his ingenious, insight, and his passion to develop excellent software...A very heartfelt farewell to the great Watts...

Ray Ozzie Chief Software Architect departs from Microsoft

The departure of Ray Ozzie was long anticipated. The timing is curious enough for me though...He is a software engineer of great talent and foresight. Before joining Microsoft, Ray has two notable products to his credit. One, Lotus Notes which was purchased by IBM somewhere around 1995. It has a lot of following even now yet its true potential was never realized. Second was Groove, which was purchased by Microsoft along with Ray himself. Groove was later assimilated in MS Sharepoint technology which was released to users of later versions of MS Office (such as office 2007). Ray has been with microsoft since 2005.

Are they gonna miss you?

Yet, interesting for me is the way, Ozzie is being hotly debated in the technology circles. He has a fair share of devotees and hostiles amongs the community so it is not uncommon to see swords being drawn in favor or against him. For me his departure from microsoft presents two gloomy scenarios for future:
1. Ray Ozzie has been a great proponent of cloud computing and has been predicting the ultimate rise of cloud computing for a very long time. In fact Sharepoint always had a strong group of people in Microsoft devoted fanatically to the idea of cloud computing. As a consequence, Microsoft under his vision has delivered a fairly impressive portfolio of cloud-based offerings. On the consumer side, Microsoft now has a full range of Windows Live services, and it’s done an impressive job of moving Exchange and SharePoint to hosted services that aren’t just for enterprises anymore. Yet, all these achievements cant gloss over the stark failure that Ray had due to his lack of vision. And today, with his departure, the future of cloud based applications from Microsoft is also in doubt.
2. The knowledge of software architecture and its relevance has also been thrown into question. With the emergent phenomenon of end user programming and cloud, the question has been present there for a very long time whether, organizations need actual software architects anymore? Today more and more services are lacking any integral underlying architecture and instead are becoming more and more capable of evolving themselves according to user's demands.With the departure of Ray from Microsoft and no replacement being announced in his seat, it seems like Microsoft has answered in affirmative regarding software architecture becoming gradually obsolete. A sad tale of affairs indeed.

Software Engineering Institute: The place that gave us CMM and CMMI has new program director

Anita Carleton

The Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI) recently named Anita Carleton director of its Software Engineering Process Management (SEPM) Program. As director of the SEPM Program, Carleton will oversee the SEI's software process and measurement initiatives, which include the internationally recognized Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) framework, which helps organizations increase the maturity of their processes to improve long-term business performance, and the Team Software Process (TSP), a software engineering method designed to yield high-quality software and high-performance teams. The link given below:

Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute Names New Program Director

Breaking news: Opensource does it again....

Ubuntu Prototype Showcases Face Recognition to Manipulate User Interface
Now you can play music, do adjustments and so forth without sitting before the terminal...sounds good prospect...

How Microsoft is positioning itself in the age of cloud computing

How Microsoft is viewing things in 2014

 They say a picture is worth a thousand words and this picture meant much more to me than that. Quite simply: Global IT spending in 2014 will be a whopping 2.5 trillion. The traditional IT market share in this mammoth amphibious will be just 400 billion. Microsoft is gearing up to tap this market through cloud computing tools such as AZURE. So the question for us in Pakistan is very simple.....are we gonna let another train miss our station?????

Computing Arbitrage: The new horizon of business models for cloud computing

Murky clouds, murkier computing

This is my first post related to a research area that I am pursuing quite vigorously these days. It has to do with cloud computing. Cloud computing has come along way now and has established itself as an active area of research. So the next big thing to happen for cloud computing must be cloud centric business models. Let’s have a look at some of the cloud computing business models that are likely to go mainstream in coming years. I spent some time thinking about it and here is the first cloud specific business model:

Computing arbitrage: One of the most innovative and impressive business models that I have studied so far. Putting in a nutshell, companies will buy bandwidth at wholesale arte and resell it to other companies for their specific needs. For example, Peekfon solved the problem of expensive roaming for the consumers in Eurpoe by buying data bandwidth in bulk and slice-it-and-dice-it to sell it to the customers. A truly classic market oriented model involving price negotiations, marketing and packaging requirements. Another aspect is the use of data compression for the purpose of bandwidth optimization.

When talking of cloud computing business models, we have to make sure that a balanced tradeoff exists between users needs for elastic computing as well as their demands for an assured fixed long term service delivery. So the need for computing arbitrage becomes quite clear. However, we can’t ignore another aspect of this whole scene. As the requirements of cloud users become more and more defined, the number of companies providing cloud services keeping a balanced tradeoff will keep on getting smaller and smaller as immature and inexperienced players will be pruned out. The danger I am visualizing is that we may be heading towards a sequel of “dot com” boom and bust. The scenario though quite far fetched now is not too unrealistic as well. All of this however, augurs well for companies that currently have a portfolio of cloud management tools or are "cloud SI".