4 posts
IBM's Cleanroom engineering achieved defect rates 100× better than industry average, then faded into obscurity.
IBM's Cleanroom software engineering process delivered 0.1 defects per thousand lines of code. The industry average at the time was between 10 and 50. The…
Literate programming promised that code should be written for humans first and machines second. Four decades later, almost nobody writes that way.
In 1984, Donald Knuth published a paper that proposed a radical inversion. Programs should not be written for compilers and annotated for humans. They should…
Michael Fagan's structured inspection process at IBM caught nearly all defects before they reached a compiler.
In 1976, Michael Fagan published a paper in the IBM Systems Journal that described a review process so effective it became the gold standard for software…
N-version programming promised that independent teams would make independent mistakes.
In the early 1980s, NASA faced a question that still haunts safety-critical engineering today: how do you tolerate bugs you haven't found yet? Their answer was…