An Interview with Watts Humphrey, Part 22: The Process Conferences and the PSP Course
This interview was provided courtesy of the Computer History Museum.
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The Process Conferences
Booch: In terms of influences, I
remember there was a lot of discussion about what’s called process programming,
and Lee Osterweil and crew were talking about that,
and Barry Boehm was in the midst of it as well. Do you have any recollection of
that being an influence, or you influencing what was going on there?
Humphrey: I participated in
those workshops -- the software process workshops. They invited me to come, and
I presented the maturity model at one of them, and everybody got all excited
about it, and so I’d do a big talk on that. I used to go to ICSE (International
Conference on Software Engineering) meetings, and I discovered surprisingly
quickly that I was really off in left field. No one was where I was, and I kept
describing what I was doing and why, and everybody was very interested in what
Booch: Yes.
Humphrey: I think it is, yeah.
Went out there, and a bunch of the guys were there. Of course, I’m the old guy.
I was the old guy in all of this stuff, and the Japanese were probably closer
than anybody to where I was, and they were pretty much reflecting what I was
saying. They’re much more people-oriented. I was quite surprised.
By the way, I didn’t
say I had put together a steering committee when I was running software process
and quality at IBM, and I had Lee Osterweil on it.
Lee Osterweil and Bob Balzer
were both on the committee. I had a bunch of academics that were coming and
reviewing what we were doing and giving us advice. I had a whole tool group and
everything else in
Booch: Breckenridge, yeah.
Humphrey: Yeah, we were
meeting in Breckenridge, and that’s where Lee Osterweil
came out with his processes are programs, and I came up with this CMM maturity
model. Harlan Mills was involved then. I didn’t talk about my interactions with
Harlan at IBM, but I did have some interactions with him there, and so Harlan
was all excited about it. I remember at the ICSE meeting where Lee Osterweil and I both presented our talks, Harlan got up and
made some comment about, “This is the best session we’ve ever had.” But he was
a wonderful guy. I loved him. I used to meet with him. I’d go over to the east
coast of
But in any event,
yes, I had met with these groups, and we were not on the same wavelength at all,
and the meetings, they’d go through all this discussion. They’d want to
automate this stuff, and they were trying to get tools to do this and that and
a language for this and it was tech-y. It wasn’t focusing on what people do and
that bothered me, because the way I thought about it was if I’m running a
programming organization how was this going to help? And I didn’t see that and
I still don’t. I mean, I think they’re still going in that same loop. I don’t
know at all. I think it stayed mostly academic but I really don’t know. I
haven’t gone back and looked. That may be unfair.
But in any event,
we’d submit papers every year and they were reviewing them. And so I’d submit a
paper every year and I’d get invited and I’d go, and one year they sent out the
reviews. I’d never gotten the reviews before, but one year they sent out the
reviews. This is for the one at
The PSP Course
However, one meeting
I did go to was the one in
So in the conference
while all these people were talking, I was organizing my textbook, and this was
early in the year, like, February. And so going to the conference, I had
outlined my textbook, and I spent the weekend in
But I had this book
to design, and I went to sit through the software process workshop the next
week. I realized that I had no further interest in it. I was getting nothing
out of these conferences in terms of what I was trying to do. So I didn’t quit
in any way, but I had decided not to continue going, so I just stopped going to
the process workshops or ICSEs. None of it seemed to
have any effect. I’ll get back to ICSE in a minute, but I wrote the textbook. I
got started in February. I had used PSP to make a plan for my textbook and I
got a hold of my publisher who published Managing
the Software Process, and he was very interested in it. I put together a
schedule. My book would take me till January to get a manuscript out, and then
I expected to submit it the following year.
Then I was deciding
what to do to teach it, and at the same time one of the guys that I had known
at the SEI who was there as a CMU student in our masters of software
engineering program was Howard -- Howie Dow -- and he
had actually spent some time with me and was very interested in what I was
doing on the PSP. When he heard I was writing a book on it and was putting
together a course, he got a hold of me and wanted to teach the course at the
Booch: It’s known as eating your own
dog food.
Humphrey: Exactly, exactly. So
I basically said, “This is why -- you might as well prove it,” so I did. And it
turned out to be a bit of a push at the end because I ended up having to
reorganize the book a couple of times. I took chapter one and then made it chapter
thirteen, and I decided I needed a whole new appendix because I was using a lot
of statistics. But I didn’t want to write a statistics textbook. I had found
statistics textbooks almost incomprehensible, so I put together an appendix A
in my A Discipline for Software
Engineering book and appendix A was, sort of, a you-drive-it statistics,
how do you do this stuff. And the programming problems I put in the textbook 10
programming problems, eight of which were all just simple statistics, simple
correlations and linear regression, multiple regression.
I had chi-squared tests and approximations, a bunch of things.
So it was a lot of
interesting stuff, but I had to explain it to people so the people who knew
nothing about statistics could read it and that’s what appendix A in my book
was. I learned a lot by writing it. Writing about statistics was fascinating. So
in any event it ended being an 800 page book, and I got the manuscript together
from February to September. Now, that’s pretty speedy, and so Howie Dow taught the course. I had decided not to teach at
McGill but to teach at CMU, and so we put a PSP course together at CMU.
And so I started that
in January and used my manuscript and taught the PSP course at CMU. I decided
to wait on submitting the manuscript. I was going to rewrite it after I taught
the course because the only data I had before I taught the course was personal
data. So I got Howie Dow’s data. The first class he
did worked well. He had lots of constructive comments. It was very helpful
having somebody else do it. There were some guys at
I guess about three
or four courses were taught and I taught some courses. Some companies got quite
interested and they worked extremely well. The course results were astounding. My
first class at CMU I think four people in that course all changed their careers
in the course to say, “This is what I want to work on.” And three of them are
working directly with us still on the TSP and PSP. They just got so excited
about it that they said, “It works. This is what process is.” A number of
people have been working on process work on the CMM even. Once they took the
PSP course, they concluded that, “Hey, now I understand it. This is really what
it is.” And that’s what it did. You really learn what a process is and why it’s
helpful when you actually use it personally to do your own work.
Booch: So thinking of other people
around this time, did you have any connections with people like Walker Royce’s
dad, Winn Royce, who wrote some of the classic papers in waterfall life-cycle
or for that matter, the work that Filipe – I forget his last name – was doing
starting around that time for what became the rational process? Did you have
connections with any of those folks?
Humphrey: Yeah, I knew Winn
Royce. I’d been involved in a number of things with the SEI and of course,
Larry brought him in periodically. A marvelous guy, a
wonderful guy. So I got to know him quite well. Of course, I got to know
Barry Boehm very well and worked with him and yeah, there’s a whole list of
people. I’ve been involved with just about everybody in the community one way
or another. I never got to know the Rational folks, but I did get to know an
awful lot of people when I got involved with him, so I’ve got an enormous array
of people that I run into that I sort of know.
And there are a lot
of people that I know that I don’t know, if you know
what I mean. They say, “Well, I met you here when…“ I’ve given an enormous
number of talks over the years and, of course, I’ve written so much stuff, but
I’ve gotten to know an awful lot of people and it’s been a very rewarding
period.