Watts Humphrey

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Watts S. Humphrey is a key thinker in the discipline of software engineering, and is often called the father of software quality. His main contribution to the software engineering processes resides in the creation of the Software Process Program at Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute. His work as a director of that program later generated the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). After that, he created the Personal Software Process (PSP) and the Team Software Process (TSP). His personal goal was always to improve quality and productivity in software development and to ease what was called the "Software Crisis".

Watts S. Humphrey founded the Software Process Program of the Software Engineering Institute(SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University in 1986, and served as director of that program until the early 90s. This program aimed at the understanding and the managing of the software engineering process because this is where big and small organizations or individuals encounter the most serious difficulties and where, thereafter, lies in the best opportunity for significant improvement.

Humphrey is the author of several books, including "Managing Technical People", Managing the Software Process, "A Discipline for Software Engineering", "The Team Software Process" and "Winning with software". Humphrey is a Fellow of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). Humphrey was previously a Vice President at IBM. The Watts Humphrey Software Quality Institute in Chennai, India is named after him.

In 2003, Watts Humphrey was awarded the National Medal of Technology. (Press Release)

In the late 1960s, Humphrey headed the IBM software team that introduced the first software license. Humphrey earned his MBA from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.