Barry W. Boehm (1935-2022) was an American software engineer and one of the founders of modern software engineering economics. He worked at the RAND Corporation and at TRW, served as a director at DARPA, and in 1992 joined the University of Southern California, where he was the TRW Professor of Software Engineering and founding director of USC’s Center for Systems and Software Engineering until his retirement in 2022.
Boehm is best known for two contributions. The first is the spiral model, introduced in his 1988 IEEE Computer paper “A Spiral Model of Software Development and Enhancement,” which made risk analysis the organizing principle of the software process. The second is the Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO), the cost-estimation framework he defined in his 1981 book “Software Engineering Economics” - according to USC, the first reliable model that let managers estimate the cost and schedule of building software.
He is also widely associated with quantifying how the cost of correcting a defect grows the later it is caught, an argument that motivated heavier emphasis on getting requirements and design right early. This reasoning runs through both his estimation work and the risk-driven structure of the spiral model.
USC described Boehm as a “living legend” in systems and software engineering. He published well over a hundred articles and several books, was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and influenced the discipline’s approach to estimation, risk, and process for decades.