Tom Gilb (full name "Thomas Steven Gilb", born 1940) is an American

systems engineer Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering and engineering management that focuses on how to design, integrate, and manage complex systems over their life cycles. At its core, systems engineering utilizes systems thinking p ...

, consultant, and author, known for the development of

software metrics In software engineering and development, a software metric is a standard of measure of a degree to which a software system or process possesses some property. Even if a metric is not a measurement (metrics are functions, while measurements are t ...

software inspection Inspection in software engineering, refers to peer review of any work product by trained individuals who look for defects using a well defined process. An inspection might also be referred to as a Fagan inspection after Michael Fagan, the creator ...

, and evolutionary processes.

Biography

Tom Gilb was born in 1940 in

Pasadena, California Pasadena ( ) is a city in Los Angeles County, California, northeast of downtown Los Angeles. It is the most populous city and the primary cultural center of the San Gabriel Valley. Old Pasadena is the city's original commercial district. I ...

, United States. He emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1956 and to Norway in 1958. He took his first job with IBM in 1958 and became a

freelance ''Freelance'' (sometimes spelled ''free-lance'' or ''free lance''), ''freelancer'', or ''freelance worker'', are terms commonly used for a person who is self-employed and not necessarily committed to a particular employer long-term. Freelance w ...

consultant in 1960. He is known for his early work on evolutionary software development processes from 1968 to 1981, which was a forerunner of

agile software development In software development, agile (sometimes written Agile) practices include requirements discovery and solutions improvement through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with their customer(s)/ end user(s), ad ...

methods. He is currently a consultant, teacher and author, in partnership with his son Kai Gilb.About Tom Gilb & Kai Gilb
/ref> He mainly helps multinational clients improve their organizations and methods by using "evolutionary systems delivery" (Evo). His method is based upon the core ideas that all architecture focus has to be on delivering value to the stakeholders and that engineering principles and scientific methods must be used in planning and management of change projects using a formal engineering language like the one that he has developed and named " Planguage". He has "guest lectured at universities all over UK, Europe, China, India, USA, Korea – and has been a keynote speaker at dozens of technical conferences internationally". He is a member of

INCOSE The International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE; pronounced in-co-see) is a not-for-profit membership organization and professional society in the field of systems engineering. INCOSE has about 17000 members including individual members, ...

and is active in the Norwegian chapter, NORSEC, which presented him with an award in 2003. He lectures at INCOSE local chapters on his worldwide travels and at INCOSE conferences. In 2012 he was made an Honorary Fellow of the

British Computer Society Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957 BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, known as the British Computer Society until 2009, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in infor ...

.BCS Roll of Honorary Fellows
/ref>

Publications

Gilb has written nine books and several articles. A selection includes: * ''Software Inspection'', 1993. . (with coauthor Dorothy Graham) * ''Principles of Software Engineering Management'', 1988. (19th printing). * ''Software Metrics (Winthrop computer systems series)'', 1977. * '' Competitive Engineering: A Handbook for Systems & Software Engineering Management using Planguage'', 2005. . (Planguage is a formal, natural language modelling notation invented by Gilb that adds rigour to the requirement documentation.)

References

External links

Gilb's website

Tom Gilb speaking at TedX in Trondheim 2013 about his engineering approach to defining all qualities in systems
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gilb, Tom 1940 births Living people Writers from Pasadena, California American expatriates in Norway IBM employees Systems engineers American software engineers Computer science writers American consultants Fellows of the British Computer Society Engineers from California