Robert Glass was a prolific software engineering author, researcher, and editor best known for "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering" (2002) and for editing the journal "Journal of Systems and Software" and the newsletter "Software Practitioner." He was a prominent voice for empirically grounded, practice-oriented thinking in a field often dominated by hype.
Glass and gerald-weinberg were peers who shared deep commitments to grounding software engineering in observable reality rather than fad and fashion. Weinberg wrote the foreword to "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering," lending his imprimatur to Glass's catalog of evidence-backed claims about software development practice. Glass in turn contributed an essay to gift-of-time-2008, the festschrift honoring Weinberg's 75th birthday.
Both men were skeptics of silver-bullet methodologies and champions of the practitioner's perspective—a stance visible in Weinberg's law-of-raspberry-jam, his weinberg-laws-and-rules, and throughout psychology-of-computer-programming-1971. Glass's work on software failures and his empirical surveys of software practice stand alongside Weinberg's contributions as foundational texts in a realist tradition within software engineering.