There are some "historical" documents in the Software Engineering field, that are often cited, but there is difficult to obtain, reading directly the original source instead of "accepting" a filtered and indirect view (even if trustable) from "modern" papers. Thus, this page try to simply list available documents on the Net that made the "history" of Software Engineering, from its origin (the 1968 Garmisch conference) on.

The first link to click on is this list of resources by Karl Kleine, not strictly oriented to Software Engineering: if you have further suggestions to provide for updating this list, please write me.


NATO 1968 Conference, Garmisch (Germany), 7-11 October 1968 -- it is the conference where the term "Software Engineering" was coined
NATO 1969 Conference, Rome (Italy), 27-31 October 1969 -- the second NATO conference after the Garmisch one
Royce W., Managing the Development of Large Software Systems, 1970 -- the paper discussing and formalizing the Waterfall lifecycle
McCabe T., A Complexity Measure, IEEE Transaction on Software Engineering, Vol. SE-2, No.4, December 1976 -- the paper that introduced the Cyclomatic Complexity measure
Chen P. , The Entity-Relationship Model: Toward a Unified View of Data, ACM Transactions on Database Systems, Vol.1, pp.9-36, 1976 -- it is the paper introducing the Entity-Relationship (E/R) model
Fagan M.E., Design and code inspections to reduce errors in program development, IBM Systems Journal, vol. 15, n.3, 1976, pp. 182-211 -- it is the paper proposing a well-know code inspection technique, keeping the name of its author
Putnam L.H., A General Empirical Solution to the Macro Software Sizing and Estimating Problem, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. SE-4, No. 4, 1978, pp 345-361 -- it is the paper proposing the SLIM model
Albrecht A., Measuring Application Development Productivity, Proceedings of the IBM Applications Development Symp., Monterey, CA (USA), Oct.14-17, 1979 -- the paper that introduced Function Points
Albrecht A. & Gaffney J.E., Software Functions, Source Lines of Code, and Development Effort Prediction: A Software Science Validation, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 9, no. 6, Nov. 1983 -- a further study proposing some modifications on FPA and discussing how to use this metric for estimation purposes
Basili V. & Weiss D., A Methodology for Collecting Valid Software Engineering Data, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol.10(3), pp. 728-738, November 1984 -- the paper that introduced the GQM (Goal-Question-Metric) paradigm
Brooks F., No Silver Bullet - Essence and Accident in Software Engineering, Proceedings of the IFIP Tenth World Computing Conference, H.J.Kugler (Editor), Elsevier Science BV, Amsterdam (NL), 1986, pp. 1069-76 -- the update of the original paper contained in "The Mythical Man Month" 1975 book
Karner G. , Resource Estimation for Objectory Projects, Technical Paper, Objective Systems SF AB, 1993 -- it is the paper introducing Use Case Points (UCP)
Chidamber S.F., Kemerer C.F., A Metrics Suite for Object-Oriented Design, IEEE Transaction on Software Engineering (TSE), Vol.20, No.6, June 1994, pp. 476-493 -- it is the paper introducing a well-know set of 6 metrics for OO-projects