Harlan Mills

Harlan D. Mills (May 14, 1919 – January 8, 1996) was Professor of Computer Science at the Florida Institute of Technology and founder of Software Engineering Technology, Inc. of Vero Beach, Florida (since acquired by Q-Labs). Mills' contributions to software engineering have had a profound and enduring effect on education and industrial practice. Since earning his Ph.D. in Mathematics at Iowa State University in 1952, Mills led a distinguished career. As an IBM research fellow, Mills adapted existing ideas from engineering and computer science to software development. These included automata theory, the structured programming theory of Edsger Dijkstra, Robert W. Floyd, and others, and Markov chain-driven software testing. His Cleanroom software development process emphasized top-down design and formal specification. Mills contributed his ideas to the profession in six books and over fifty refereed articles in technical journals. Mills was termed a "super-programmer", a term which would evolve to the concept in IBM of a "Chief Programmer." Ph.D.: Iowa State University, 1952 Visiting Professor (Part Time) 1975-1987 Adjunct Professor, 1987-1995 Chairman, NSF Computer Science Research Panel on Software Methodology, 1974–77 the Chairman of the First National Conference on Software Engineering, 1975 Editor for IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 1975–81 U.S. Representative for Software at the IFIP Congress, 1977 Governor of the IEEE Computer Society, 1980–83 Chairman for IEEE Fall CompCon, 1981 Chairman, Computer Science Panel, U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, 1986 Awardee, Distinguished Information Sciences Award, DPMA 1985 Designer of initial NFL scheduling algorithm () The ICSE-affiliated colloquium "Science and Engineering for Software Development" is being organized in honor of Harlan D. Mills, and as a recognition of his enduring legacy to the theory and practice of software engineering. The ICSE-affiliated colloquium "Science and Engineering for Software Development" was being organized in honor of Harlan D.