Tom Gilb

Developer of software metrics, software inspection, and evolutionary processes, Gilb is an American systems engineer, consultant, and author known for bringing quantitative measurement approaches to software development. Since quantitative measurements are essential in all sciences, there has been a continuous effort by computer science practitioners and theoreticians to bring similar approaches to software development. The goal has been obtaining objective, reproducible, and quantifiable measurements, which have numerous valuable applications in schedule and budget planning, cost estimation, quality assurance testing, software debugging, software performance optimization, and optimal personnel task assignments.

Gilb 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 five years, and became a freelance consultant in 1960. Gilb worked mainly within the software engineering community, but from 1983 also addressed Corporate Top Management problems, and from 1988 worked with large-scale systems engineering in the areas of Aircraft, Telecoms, and Electronics. His methods have been widely and officially adopted by many organizations such as IBM, Nokia, Ericsson, HP, Intel, and Citigroup, among many other large and small organizations.

He has been 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 raising the professional stature of systems engineers. Gilb has been active in the Norwegian chapter, NORSEC, and has lectured 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 has worked as a consultant, teacher, and author in partnership with his son Kai Gilb. Gilb has primarily helped multinational clients improve their organizations and methods by using "Evolutionary Systems Delivery" (Evo). He has guest lectured at universities across the UK, Europe, China, India, USA, and Korea, and has also served as a keynote speaker at dozens of technical conferences internationally.

Gilb wrote nine books and several articles, a few of which include: "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, and one paper—"Laws of Unreliability," Datamation, March 1975—presented his Laws of Unreliability, which garnered over 22,000 Google hits.