John D. Musa

Musa was born on Long Island, New York. He studied at Dartmouth College, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1954 with a B.S. in engineering sciences and followed with an M.S. in electrical engineering at the same institution.^[4][5] Musa joined the US Navy after graduation as a member of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps. In 1958, he joined the AT&T Bell Labs, where he first worked on the Nike Zeus anti-missile system.^[1] He started working on software reliability since 1973, which began with the revolutionary paper published in 1975 in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, titled A Theory of Software Reliability and its Application.^[1] Musa constructed in the work a first empirical model of software reliability using mean time between failures data collected from software used at Bell Labs in the early 1970s.^[6] In 1987, Musa published the foundational book on the topic, named Software Reliability: Measurements, Prediction, Application, along with Bell Labs colleagues Anthony Iannino and Kazuhira Okumoto.^[1]

Musa was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 1986. In 2004, Musa was named the Engineer of the Year by the IEEE Reliability Society.^[7][8]

• Musa, John D.; Iannino, Anthony; Okumoto, Kazuhira (1987). Software reliability: measurement, prediction, application. McGraw-Hill series in software engineering and technology. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-044093-7.
• Musa, John D. (1999). Software reliability engineering: more reliable software, faster development and testing. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-913271-0.