Barry W. Boehm, professor of software engineering and director of the USC Viterbi School Center for Software Engineering, has been honored for his many accomplishments in the field with a conference room newly bearing his name.

Donations for the naming came from more than a dozen individual and corporate admirers.

“‘SAL 322’ will be known from now on as the Barry Boehm Conference Room,” said Yanis Yortsos, senior associate dean for academic affairs in the USC Viterbi School.

“I don’t know of anyone with a more complete set of arenas in which he is a leader,” Yortsos said. “Industry at TRW and Rand … government at DARPA … and academia at, we’re proud to say, the computer science department of the Viterbi School of Engineering.”

A longtime faculty member and highly regarded computer scientist, Boehm is best known for his work in value-based software engineering.

He created a method for integrating a software system’s process models, product models, property models and success models, called “model-based system architecting and software engineering,” also known as M-BASE.

He invented many value-based software methods, such as the “constructive cost model” (COCOMO), the “spiral model,” “Theory W,” a win-win approach to software management, and “requirements determination,” which formed the foundations for software risk management and software quality factor analysis.

Boehm also advanced two software engineering environments: the TRW software productivity system and the “quantum leap” environment. (TRW was acquired by Northrop Grumman in 2002.)

“He is an incredibly brilliant man,” said Betsy Clark, a senior consultant at Software Metrics Inc., in Haymarket, Va. “I really admire how he has reached out to industry to get them involved … it makes everything we [computer engineers] do that much more relevant.”

Boehm founded USC’s Center for Software Engineering in 1993 to provide an environment for research and teaching in the areas of large-scale software design and development processes.

The center also began to develop generic and domain specific software architectures, software engineering tools and environments, cooperative system designs and software engineering economics.