History

The Software Industry Special Interest Group is dedicated to preserving the history of the software industry, one of the largest and most influential industries in the world today. The industry originated with the entrepreneurial computer software and services companies of the 1950s and 1960s, grew dramatically through the 1970s and 1980s to become a market force rivaling that of the computer hardware companies, and by the 1990s had become the supplier of technical know-how that transformed the way people worked, played and communicated every day of their lives. The SI SIG is working to preserve for future generations information about the companies, people, products, and events that shaped the evolution of this vital industry. The SI SIG has a very active program to conduct oral histories, collect historical source materials about companies in the industry, organize meetings and workshops, publish articles on this website, in the Computer History Museum’s Core Magazine and in the IEEE Annals of Computing History and to collect materials from industry pioneers. You can be a part of this effort to preserve software industry history by using the Contact Us button on the left of this screen. The separation of debugging from testing was initially introduced by Glenford J. Myers in 1979. Although his attention was on breakage testing ("a successful test is one that finds a bug"[citation needed]), it illustrated the desire of the software engineering community to separate fundamental development activities, such as debugging, from that of verification. Dave Gelperin and William C. Hetzel classified in 1988 the phases and goals in software testing in the following stages: Until 1956 - Debugging oriented 1957-1978 - Demonstration oriented 1979-1982 - Destruction oriented 1983-1987 - Evaluation oriented 1988-2000 - Prevention oriented