Most recently, he was IBM's Director of Programming Quality and Process. Mr. Humphrey holds graduate degrees in Physics from the Illinois Institute of Technology and Business Administration from the University of Chicago. He is an SEI Fellow, a member of the ACM, an IEEE Fellow, and a past member of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Board of Examiners. He was awarded the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Software Engineering Award for 1993, and the SEI Leadership Award in 1997. His publications include many technical papers and six books.
Some software projects fails spectacularly.
In this talk, the speaker will discuss two of them - the debacle of the Denver airport baggage handling system, and the wreckage of the Westpac Bank information system in Australia. The talk will focus on an insider's view of the two projects, as retold from the speaker's book Software Runaways, but will add some fresh and recent insights into what really went wrong. Other software projects struggle mightily before succeeding. The speaker will conclude by discussing one of those, a project more representative of what really happens in industry projects. Terrible schedule pressures nearly scuttle the project before the organization in question is able to turn things around.