History of Software Engineering

• Software engineering


  The discipline concerned with all aspects of software production
• Software was first coined by John Tukey in 1958
• The theoretical concept of a computer was first established by Alan Turing in the 1930's
• The concept of algorithm was introduced by Muhammad Al-Khawarezmi, a 9th century mathematician
• Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer
• Alan Kay


  • Pioneered work on window based graphical user interfaces
  • Coined the term object-oriented programming in 1966
• Ali Mili


  • Contributed to the formalization of software fault tolerance
• Barry Boehm


  • Contributed to the area of software engineering economics and software metrics
  • Introduced the spiral model for software development
• Bill Joy


  • Contributed to the development of the Unix operating system and the Java programming language
• Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie


  • Instrumental in developing the Unix operating system and the C programming language
• C.A.R. Hoare


  • Introduced the concepts of assertions and program proof of correctness
  • Designed and analyzed well-known algorithms
  • Developed communicating sequential processes, a formal language for the specification of concurrent processes
• David Parnas


  • Introduced the concepts of information hiding, software interfaces and software modularity
  • Contributed to software engineering education and the ethical responsibilities of a software engineer
• Donald Knuth


  • Known for the design of many well-known computer algorithms and the use of rigorous mathematical techniques for the formal analysis of the complexity of algorithms
• Edsger Dijkstra


  • Introduced the concept of structured programming
  • Carried out in-depth studies of the problems of concurrency and synchronization needed in complex distributed systems
• Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides


  • Introduced the concept of object oriented design patterns to facilitate software design reuse
• Fred Brooks


  • Contributed to the development of the OS/360 operating system software
  • Introduced the mythical man-month in software project management
• Friedrich Bauer


  • Introduced the use of stacks for expression evaluation in programming language compilers
  • Contributed to the development of the ALGOL
  • Coined the term software engineering in the NATO conference held in Germany in 1968
• Grace Hopper


  • Contributed extensively to the first compiler and the COBOL programming language in the 1959's
• Grady Booch


  • Known for his method for object oriented analysis and design
  • Co-developed the unified modeling language (UML)
• John Backus


  • Invented FORTRAN, compiler optimization, and the Backus-Naur Form for the formal description of programming language syntax
• Michael Fagan


  • Contributed extensively to the area of software inspection
• Niklaus Wirth


  • Introduced the Pascal programming language and other languages
  • Contributed to the idea of decomposition and stepwise refinement
• Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard


  • Introduced the Simula language which was the first object-oriented programming language
• Peter Naur


  • Contributed to the creation of the ALGOL programming language and the introduction of formal syntax description language
• Tom DeMarco and Edward Yourdon


  • Introduced the structured analysis and design approach for specifying and designing software systems
• Watts Humphrey


  • Known for his work on the capability maturity model developed by the software engineering institute and the personal software process
• Winston Royce


  • Contributed the well-known model for the management of large software systems which was later named the Waterfall model