Software Reliability: Principles & Practices — Glenford J. Myers, 1976 | Vintage Software Engineering

Published while software engineering was still defining many of its fundamental practices, Glenford J. Myers’ Software Reliability: Principles and Practices examines one of computing’s most persistent problems: how to build software that can be trusted to work correctly.

Myers approaches reliability across the full software-development process, including program design, structured programming, testing, debugging, proofs of correctness, programming-language design, and mathematical reliability models. Contemporary descriptions characterized it as a survey of the then-current techniques for dealing with the inherent unreliability of computer programs.

The testing material is particularly interesting in retrospect. The pictured chapter lays out testing principles that remain recognizable today: test invalid as well as valid inputs, inspect results carefully, and recognize that software defects tend to cluster. Myers would expand this work in his influential 1979 book The Art of Software Testing, which Wiley continues to describe as a landmark work in the field.

At the time of publication Myers was a staff member of IBM’s Systems Research Institute and a lecturer in computer science at the Polytechnic Institute of New York. The book therefore captures software reliability thinking from the period when large institutional computer systems were becoming increasingly dependent on complex software rather than hardware alone.

Condition:
Vintage hardcover with original dust jacket. Jacket has noticeable edge wear and several tears/chips along the lower edge and corners, plus a vintage library-style identification label at the top of the front. Hardcover and interior appear substantially cleaner, with pages intact and readable. See photographs for exact condition.