Barry W. Boehm (1935-2022) was a pioneering software engineer and economist, best known for the COCOMO cost estimation model and the Spiral Model of software development. He was a professor at the University of Southern California and one of the most influential figures in plan-driven software engineering.
Relationship to DeMarco
Boehm and DeMarco were professional contemporaries who occupied complementary positions in the software engineering world. Both contributed to the discipline's empirical foundations — Boehm through cost modeling (COCOMO) and process frameworks (the Spiral Model), DeMarco through the coding-war-games and the sociological analysis of peopleware.
They co-authored "the-agile-methods-fray" (2002) in IEEE Computer, addressing the emerging tension between agile and plan-driven approaches. They also appeared together on the "retrospectives-on-peopleware" panel at ICSE 2007. Their collaboration represents a meeting of the quantitative estimation tradition (Boehm) and the humanistic management tradition (DeMarco) — two approaches that the software engineering community has struggled to integrate.
Boehm's work on software risk management also connects to DeMarco and timothy-lister's waltzing-with-bears, though the two approached risk from different angles: Boehm as a process engineering problem, DeMarco and Lister as an organizational behavior problem.