Mr. Tom Gilb

An American systems engineer, consultant, and author, known for the development of software inspection, evolutionary processes and software metric, a quantitative measure of a degree to which a software system or process possesses some property. Since quantitative measurements are essential in all sciences, there is a continuous effort by computer science practitioners and theoreticians to bring similar approaches to software development. The goal is obtaining objective, reproducible and quantifiable measurements, which may have numerous valuable applications in schedule and budget planning, cost estimation, quality assurance testing, software debugging, software performance optimization, and optimal personnel task assignments. He is also the inventor of Planguage, a formal, natural language modelling notation which adds rigour to the requirement documentation. He is directly recognized as the idea source for parts of the Agile and Extreme programming methods (primarily the incremental cycles). Born in Pasadena, California, USA, he emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1956 and to Norway in 1958. He took his first job with IBM in 1958 where he worked for 5 years, and became a freelance consultant in 1960. He has mainly worked within the software engineering community, but since 1983 with Corporate Top Management problems; and since 1988 with large-scale systems engineering (Aircraft, Telecoms and Electronics). His methods are widely and officially adopted by many organizations such as IBM, Nokia, Ericsson, HP, Intel, Citigroup - and many other large and small organizations. He is a member of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE; pronounced in-co-see); a non-profit membership organization dedicated to the advancement of systems engineering and to raise the professional stature of systems engineers. He is active in the Norwegian chapter, NORSEC. He lectures at INCOSE local chapters on his worldwide travels and at INCOSE conferences. In 2012 he was made an Honorary Fellow of the British Computer Society. He is currently a consultant, teacher and author, in partnership with his son Kai Gilb. He mainly helps multinational clients improve their organizations and methods by using "Evolutionary Systems Delivery" (Evo). He has "guest lectured at universities all over UK, Europe, China, India, USA, and Korea. He has also been a keynote speaker at dozens of technical conferences internationally". He has written nine books and several articles a few of which include: ?Software Inspection (book)|Software Inspection?, 1993. ISBN 0-201-63181-4; ?Principles of Software Engineering Management?, 1988. ISBN 0-201-19246-2 (19th printing); ?Software Metrics (Winthrop computer systems series)?, 1977; and ?Competitive Engineering: A Handbook for Systems & Software Engineering Management using Planguage,? 2005. ISBN 0-7506-6507-6. He has published hundreds of papers. One paper (Laws of Unreliability, Datamation, March 1975) gave his Laws of Unreliability (over 22,000 Google hits).