An Interview with Watts Humphrey, Part 30: The TSP Team and Six Months to Live
This interview was provided courtesy of the Computer History Museum.
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The TSP Team
Humphrey: We formed the TSP group in
about 1996 or '97, and Jim Over became the leader of the very small group. Jim
Over and Dan Burton joined us. Dan was an interesting guy, by the way. Dan had
been a Major, I believe, in the Air Force and was in the program office that
formed the SEI. And so when he retired from the service he couldn't go work at
the SEI right away, so he worked for a year in one of the local software
companies. He was doing software development, and then he came and joined us. And
so he's been on our team ever since and been a marvelous asset. We had a bunch
of other people. Julia Mullaney was in my first PSP
course and she joined us, and then we gradually built a team, rather slowly. We
didn’t have much funding, and we've been fighting the DOD on this thing since
the beginning by the way.
And I basically never
got funding for this stuff. It was my own work and we basically had to almost
self-fund. We got some funding and some backing but not a whole lot and so we
have been scrambling to try to get this thing done ever since. And it was years
of that with no one really understanding what it was or buying it or anything. Even
in the SEI. And the DOD people who have worked on this, for some reason they
had a very negative view of the PSP and the TSP, and I think it was because
they had a negative view of me, and I'm not quite sure why. But they
fundamentally got working on the CMMI integrated thing, and I was focusing on
software, and I guess they felt that I was too narrow or something. I don’t
know.
Booch: And if my history serves me
correctly, this is around the time of the DOD having its specifications for
software development that was-- what was it -- 493 or 2167? I'm trying to
remember the numbers.
Humphrey: Well there was 2167 in there.
Booch: That's right. As I looked at
that relative to the work that you were doing, you can see that these were on
very different paths. And your work hadn't yet influenced that activity yet.
Humphrey: Exactly. Exactly.
And it really hasn't yet. I'm not sure who we're influencing except ourselves
and industry. Not influencing that crowd. But in any event, so we realized
rather quickly we had to have people teach this stuff. And so fundamentally the
group watched me teach and they started teaching it. And then we realized
rather quickly we needed more instructors because we were starting to run into
more companies. So we put together a course to train instructors, and we put
together a course to train coaches. And then we started working with other
people who wanted to form their own companies and go out and introduce the PSP
and TSP.
And that's sort of
what's been happening over time, although typically the bulk of it is still us.
Although we find that the people who are trying to make a business out of this
are not doing all that well yet. But we do when we start with a company like
Microsoft or Oracle or Intuit or people like that. Adobe is another one, who
buy it and they're doing it -- we train their own people to be their own instructors
and coaches so they become self-sufficient. And so that's what we do there so
that people can do it on their own, and we can begin
to grow it and expand it. And they can train their own resident coaches. People
have to have coaches on site because having remote coaches come in is
difficult. We have to do it when we start, but we really like people to get
their own coaches.
Booch: So that brings us to the late
'90s then. And it sounds like, you know, the next several years were still
largely consumed with growing that activity. And growing the teams and spending
a lot of time out with real customers doing this. Is that a fair
characterization?
Humphrey: Yeah. We had to improve our
courses and the training and the tools and begin to build credibility and get
more people familiar with what we're doing and what's going on. And that worked
fine. And so we've made a lot of progress, and there are a lot of people using
this. We've got hundreds of companies that now use the TSP.
Booch: Now.
Humphrey: That's enough on how we started
the TSP.
Booch: It's my recollection that you
and I ran into each other around that same time as well. Wasn't it on, gosh it
was on some Army project that you and I were together on. Was that?
Humphrey: That was early. That was very
early, that was in 1989 I believe, '88 or '89.
Booch: How quickly I forget.
Humphrey: That was the AFATADS project
and it was at Magnavox.
Booch: Yes I remember now. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Humphrey: Out in the middle –
Booch: Yes. Yes. Yes.
Humphrey: You and I were there and I
remember the people going by the door, that's Grady Booch. …your
Booch: That's right.
Humphrey: And so, yeah. No, I remember
that well. We had actually an audit as I recall for the Army.
Booch: Yes. Yes.
Humphrey: And as I recall, prior to the
audit, I had led a CMM assessment of that facility. So I'd already done an
assessment of the location, I knew a lot of what was going on inside the group,
but I promised them that if I was on and I -- this was part of what we agreed
with their management because they were -- we were called in by the Army to do
an audit of them, and I was reluctant to participate unless it was an effort
that Magnavox was actually participating in. So there would be a joint effort,
and we report to their management, and they finally agreed with that, so that
we had that worked out before I did the assessment there.
Booch: Right I remember that now.
Humphrey: Yeah. So this was way before
the PSP and TSP started.
Booch: How quickly I forget. Well I
hope I have as good as a memory as you do in the order of things.
Humphrey: I plug them in to where I was
to this whole thing. I sort of see it in terms of the time frame when I
published the book on that, and so I sort of have a time scale there. Well, as
I say the cycle we went through now was to expand this, and there are a few
stories that I want to tell you with what we're doing with
Booch: Very good. let's turn the topic of
discussion to where is [PSP] now and kind of where is it headed. Can you take
us from there?
Humphrey: Great. Love to. And,
by the way, I very much appreciate all the time you're taking. We've had some
14 hours of interview so far so it's sort of babbling on, and I must admit it's great fun to relive all this and talk through it.
Okay, well, where we stand right now, very
briefly: we've got a group of about 10 people at the SEI in
Six Months to Live
Booch: What would you be
willing to sort of interject here about your current cancer? You and I have
talked about it. We don't really have anything on tape there. Would you feel
comfortable spending a few minutes talking about that situation?
Humphrey: Of course. Sure. Yeah.
Well, I remember exactly when it hit. It was February 19th this year [2009]. I
was feeling great. Came back from lunch with some wonderful friends and, about
4:00 in the afternoon, I got chills and fever and I just couldn't get warm. I
bundled completely up, went to bed. About 9:00, I got up and called Barbara about,
you know, “I don't feel very good” and I passed out cold. <laughs> So she called 911, they took me into the
hospital. This was late on a Thursday night, about 9:30/10:00 Thursday night. They
got me into the emergency room and started doing tests, obviously, to see what
the heck it was. They got me in a room there and, during the day on, I think,
Saturday, they came back and said I appeared to have a blood infection. It's
not easy to get blood infections. But, in any event, I had an infection in my
blood and I asked the doctor, "How serious is that?" and he said,
"If you weren't in good shape, you'd be dead."
Now, that got my attention. Now the
challenge was to find out what caused this infection and, of course, they
started me on all kinds of antibiotics and they really blasted me with them. Sunday
they took me down to do various scans and things, and Monday the doctor went
down my throat with one of these things to probe and see where the infection or
where the problem was, and they obviously produced a report from the CAT scan
and all the other stuff that was going on. My doctor faxed it to my daughter,
who's an M.D, and Tuesday she called me and said, "Dad, you've got cancer
of the liver and they say it's inoperable."
I said, "That doesn't sound good."
Well, the doctors hadn't told me and, of course, they had more tests to do and
stuff, but my daughter knew I wanted to know what was going on so she told me. So
I arranged to get out of the hospital right then. They'd finished all the
stuff, antibiotics and stuff, and they finally let me go Wednesday morning, and
I went to see the oncologist and he said, yeah, it was cholangial
carcinoma of the liver, that those cancers do not respond to primary treatment
with either radiation or chemotherapy and that, in my case, mine happened to be
inoperable.
I said, "Well, how long have I
got?" and he said, "Three to six months." This was four months
ago. So, you know, that's a bit of a problem. <laughs>
The doctor, by the way, told me what we should do is to look for somebody who
had an experimental treatment or something that may deal with it. Other than
that, I'd just have to wait, and we could decide whether I wanted to do chemo
or radiation or not but there was no evidence it would help extend my lifespan.
So, in any event, it was kind of dismal. So
my MD daughter came up with Sloan-Kettering in
Well, that sounded pretty damn good to me,
so we headed up to Boston and, when we came in Monday, he'd gotten the top
cancer surgeon from Mass General and the director of all the radiation therapy
and stuff, both of them to see me Monday afternoon, squeezing all this into
their very busy schedules. I mean, it isn't like these guys have nothing else
to do. So I was enormously impressed. They were thinking of me as a person, not
just another case. The surgeon said, "Yes, there is no way we can operate
on this cancer. It is, in fact, impossible to remove it to surgery." Then
the director of radiation therapy there from Mass General said, "It turns
out, we have an experimental program with National Institutes of Health using
something called proton radiation."
It turns out proton radiation -- I had the
guy describe what was going on -- and what they do is they use a cyclotron and
they actually radiate the cancer with protons, and the proton radiation has a
particularly powerful profile when it actually impinges on the body because, if
you use high-energy protons from a cyclotron, the protons go right through the
outer layers of the skin and stuff, and then they gradually slow down and
finally get captured at some depth, depending on how much stuff they've gone
through and they dump most of their energy where they're stopped. About 70% of
the proton energy goes right to the cancer.
They have a way this guy had come up with
to do that, and the real invention was that the liver moves when you breathe. So
normal radiation treatment doesn't work with the liver, so he'd come up with a
way to actually gate it while you breathe and all that sort of thing. So if you
have to stop breathing, that's a little counterproductive. But, in any event,
so they accepted me in the program. They'd had 15 people so far and the program
was for 15 people, by the way, so I thought, oops, I'm out. It turned out he'd
gotten permission from the NIH to continue using it before the Phase II study
started in four months. These guys were thinking of people and so he
<laughs> really -- it was amazing because everything they did, they were
talking about it, they wanted to know about me and my family, and it was just
so marvelous to deal with these doctors who were really so personally involved
and concerned.
But I got into the program. I completed all
the radiation treatment. The first 14 patients they had completed, it appeared
to have eliminated the cancer in the radiation field. So it looked like it is
completely successful on eliminating the primary cancer. That doesn't mean it's
over, however, because, in over 80% of the cases, this cancer metastasizes,
it's kind of aggressive, and so I’ve got to continue chemo and stuff like that.
Apparently, just
in the last few weeks, at the cancer society that my Dr. Ryan up there at Mass
General went to, the oncologist, he learned about a new chemo treatment that is
quite effective, like, 40%. So the odds here look not too bad and it looks like
there's a chance that I may actually have it cured. When I talk about life
expectancy, they say, "Yeah, you've probably got, you know, two to three
years maybe and you may be lucky and go longer than that."
But the rule basically is to take it a
month at a time and that's essentially what I'm doing. So I'm in that
treatment. I'm in the chemotherapy. I went out -- I'm a jogger, that's why I'm
alive, I guess -- and I went out and I had a jog and a walk yesterday. I don't
have a whole lot of energy, it’s kind of tiring, but I'm feeling fine. I'm very
optimistic. I just went out last week and bought a baby grand piano. I'm taking
piano lessons and starting to work on another book and so, you know, you just
go ahead and do what you're going to do.
Booch: Thank you. That's
great. You're truly a renaissance man. You're learning to play the piano at
your age. That's great. Have you played before?
Humphrey: I sort of fiddled
with it but I never had lessons really. I'd had violin lessons as a kid. My
older brother got piano lessons and, after I practiced the violin for about --
it must have been six or seven years -- I finally concluded I had to practice
an hour a day just to be a lousy violinist, and so I quit it. I've always
wanted to play the piano, but the problem is, as I got older, I hate to sit
down and practice and, you know, you've got to repeat things ten times and all
that kind of stuff, which is kind of annoying, and I'd bother everybody and you
feel kind of you don't want to do that. So I did get an electronic piano with
ear phones about three years ago and I started fiddling with that, and I
learned about fake books and stuff. Then two years ago, I went over to the
piano dealer and was asking him some questions and asked him if he knew anybody
who would give me lessons, and so he's giving me lessons. I started piano
lessons two years ago, the day after my birthday, the day after my 80th
birthday. I figured I was old enough. So I've been doing that and Barbara
finally agreed that, yes, we can have a grand piano, so I bought one last week
and they're installing it the day before my birthday, they say, next week. So
that's what we're doing. I'm having a wonderful time and, as I say, you live a
day at a time.
Booch: And almost happy
birthday because you'll be turning 82 on July 4th, I believe you said.
Humphrey: That's correct.
Booch: Great, great.
Humphrey: I will say, in
terms of all this stuff on the radiation treatment, this particular treatment
I'm getting is not public. There aren't any papers on it yet. It's totally
experimental. It's the only place in the world. I'm the 16th person in the
world to get this treatment. I just feel enormously fortunate to have somehow
stumbled into this all but, as the accidents that happened, I mean, if the
people at Sloan-Kettering had said, you know, bring him right up, I would never
have run into this.
Booch: Yeah.
Humphrey: A whole range of
things have happened and my daughter and the accidental e-mail and I just sort
of go down the list and say, if look at it in terms of probabilities, it's
about as close to a miracle as they get. So I'm feeling totally blessed.
Booch: Very good. Well,
we got to this point because you mentioned you've sort of changed your work
style because of the cancer and thank you for that little side track there to
discuss it. Let's go back now to where you're involved with TSP and where it's
headed.