The “father of Software Quality”, Watts Humphrey expired on Thu 28-OCT-2010.

When Watts Humphrey arrived at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in 1986, he made what he called an “outrageous commitment to change the world of software engineering.” During his tenure at the SEI, he established the Software Process Program, led development of the Software Capability Maturity Model, and introduced the Software Process Assessment and Software Capability Evaluation methods. These later became the basis for the development of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), a framework of software engineering best practices that has been adopted by thousands or organizations throughout the world.

Citi’s various technology divisions, including but not limited to Citicorp Overseas Software Limited (COSL), CiITIL, Citibank Asia Pacific Technology, were some of the pioneers to have adopted SEI-CMM.

CMM has also become the basis for various Maturity Models including the Payment Maturity Model (PMM) a work-in-progress model introduced at SIBOS 2010 last week.