John D. Musa

John Davis Musa (1933 – April 25, 2009) was an American software engineer and a founding father of software reliability engineering.[1][2][3]

Education and career

Musa was born on Long Island, New York. He studied at Dartmouth College, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1954 with a B.S. in engineering sciences and followed with an M.S. in electrical engineering at the same institution.[4][5] Musa joined the US Navy after graduation as a member of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps. In 1958, he joined the AT&T Bell Labs, where he first worked on the Nike Zeus anti-missile system.[1] He started working on software reliability since 1973, which began with the revolutionary paper published in 1975 in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, titled A Theory of Software Reliability and its Application.[1] Musa constructed in the work a first empirical model of software reliability using mean time between failures data collected from software used at Bell Labs in the early 1970s.[6] In 1987, Musa published the foundational book on the topic, named Software Reliability: Measurements, Prediction, Application, along with Bell Labs colleagues Anthony Iannino and Kazuhira Okumoto.[1]

Musa was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 1986. In 2004, Musa was named the Engineer of the Year by the IEEE Reliability Society.[7][8]

Books

  • Musa, John D.; Iannino, Anthony; Okumoto, Kazuhira (1987). Software reliability: measurement, prediction, application. McGraw-Hill series in software engineering and technology. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-044093-7.
  • Musa, John D. (1999). Software reliability engineering: more reliable software, faster development and testing. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-913271-0.

References

  1. ^ a b c d Cusick, James J. (2024-12-02). "The First 50 Years of Software Reliability Engineering: A History of SRE with First Person Accounts". arXiv:1902.06140 [cs.SE].
  2. ^ Iannino, Anthony; Musa, John D. (1990), "Software Reliability", Advances in Computers, vol. 30, Elsevier, pp. 85–170, doi:10.1016/s0065-2458(08)60299-5, ISBN 978-0-12-012130-4, retrieved 2026-01-20{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
  3. ^ Everett, William; Cusick, James; Williams, Laurie (2009). "John D. Musa". IEEE Software. 26 (5): 102. Bibcode:2009ISoft..26e.102E. doi:10.1109/MS.2009.132. ISSN 0740-7459.
  4. ^ "Alumni Articles | Dartmouth Alumni Magazine". Dartmouth Alumni Magazine | The Complete Archive. 1964.
  5. ^ Basili, V. R.; Musa, J. D. (1991). "The future generation of software: a management perspective". Computer. 24 (9): 90–96. Bibcode:1991Compr..24i..90B. doi:10.1109/2.84903. ISSN 0018-9162.
  6. ^ Shooman, Martin L. (1984). "Software reliability: A historical perspective". IEEE Transactions on Reliability. R-33 (1): 48–55. Bibcode:1984ITR....33...48S. doi:10.1109/TR.1984.6448274. ISSN 0018-9529.
  7. ^ "ISSRE 2024". issre.github.io. Retrieved 2026-01-20.
  8. ^ "John Musa Obituary (2009) - Newark, NJ - The Star-Ledger". Legacy.com.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.