SOFTWARE ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT

   With a new mission coming up that would be utilizing digital command systems and a large database to store the data from  Atmospheric Explorer's C, D, and E, I was put in charge of a programming team to develop the software that would extract data from the database, process it, and produce reports. The software had to understand the complex command system of the spectrometer, and I decided that I would write a "super-module" to handle all that decoding.
     Since my father's field was architectural engineering, I had the idea that there should be an engineering-like approach to building the software and managing the project.  There were no "software blueprint" methodologies around that addressed the "architectural" design, so I invented "Leighton Diagrams".  This methodology worked so well that I submitted a paper to the Third International Conference of Software Engineering a few years later.  The paper was accepted, and after giving the talk in Atlanta, I was invited to give it at a management science conference in Houston. Requests for the paper came in from a number of foreign countries as well as the US.
    Once of the reviewers of the paper was Lawrence Peters of Boeing Computer Services.  Boeing starting using the methodology on projects even before the paper was given in Atlanta, and later Mr. Peters wrote a book on software design methodologies that gave the nod to Leighton Diagrams over anything else in the field, including HIPO diagrams developed at IBM.