Barry W. Boehm HICSS-38 Distinguished Lecturer "Value-Based Software and Systems Engineering"

Dr. Bohem will speak at the HICSS conference
January  5, 2005
5pm Monarchy Ballroom
Hilton Waikoloa Village 

Much of current software engineering research and practice is done in a value-neutral way, in which every requirement, use case, object, test case, and defect is treated as equally important.  Methods are presented and practiced as largely logical activities, and a separation of concerns is practiced, in which the responsibility of software engineers is confined to turning pre-specified requirements into code. 

In earlier times, when software decisions had relatively minor influences on a system's cost, schedule, and value, the value-neutral approach was reasonably workable.  But today and increasingly in the future, software decisions will have a major influence on most systems' cost, schedule, and value, and value-neutral decisions can seriously degrade project outcomes. 

This talk presents an agenda for and the beginnings of a discipline of value-based software engineering (VBSE).  It accepts the challenge of integrating value considerations into all of the existing and emerging software engineering principles and practices, and of developing an overall framework in which they compatibly reinforce each other.   It presents a 4+1 theoretical basis for VBSE, integrating the disciplines of utility theory, decision theory, dependency theory, and control theory via the stakeholder win-win Theory W.  It describes seven key VBSE practices: Benefits Realization Analysis, Stakeholder Value Proposition Elicitation and Reconciliation, Business Case Analysis, Continuous Risk and Opportunity Management, Concurrent Systems and Software Engineering, Value-Based Monitoring and Control, and Change as Opportunity.  It provides examples of the use of these practices and the resulting benefits. 

Barry W. Boehm is TRW Professor of Software Engineering and Director, Center for Software Engineering, University of Southern California.  Dr. Boehm 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. in Computer Science from the U. of Massachusetts in 2000.

Between 1989 and 1992, he served within the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) as Director of the DARPA Information Science and Technology Office, and as Director of the DDR&E Software and Computer Technology Office. He worked at TRW from 1973 to 1989, culminating as Chief Scientist of the Defense Systems Group, and at the Rand Corporation from 1959 to 1973, culminating as Head of the Information Sciences Department. He was a Programmer-Analyst at General Dynamics between 1955 and 1959.    

Dr. Boehm's current research interests focus on value-based software engineering, including a method for integrating a software system's process models, product models, property models, and success models called Model-Based (System) Architecting and Software Engineering (MBASE).  His contributions to the field include the Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO), the Spiral Model of the software process, the Theory W (win-win) approach to software management and requirements determination, the foundations for the areas of software risk management and software quality factor analysis, and two advanced software engineering environments: the TRW Software Productivity System and Quantum Leap Environment.    

Dr. Boehm has 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 has served as Chair of the AIAA Technical Committee on Computer Systems, Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Software Engineering, and as a member of the Governing Board of the IEEE Computer Society. He has also served as 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, and Chair of the Board of Visitors for the CMU Software Engineering Institute.

Honors and awards include Guest Lecturer of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1970), the AIAA Information Systems Award (1979), the J.D. Warnier Prize for Excellence in Information Sciences (1984), the ISPA Freiman Award for Parametric Analysis (1988), the NSIA Grace Murray Hopper Award (1989), the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence (1992), the ASQC Lifetime Achievement Award (1994), the ACM Distinguished Research Award in Software Engineering (1997), and the IEEE Harlan D. Mills Award (2000). He is a Fellow of the primary professional societies in computing (ACM), aerospace (AIAA), electronics (IEEE), and systems engineering (INCOSE), and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

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