History of Software Engineering

Like many important contributions to software engineering, structured analysis was not introduced with a single landmark paper or book. Early work in analysis modeling was begun in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but the first appearance of the structured analysis approach was as an adjunct to another important topic—"structured design." Researchers  needed a graphical notation for representing data and the processes that transformed it. These processes would ultimately be mapped into a design architecture.

The term structured analysis, originally coined by Douglas Ross, was popularized by DeMarco . In his book on the subject, DeMarco introduced and named the key graphical symbols and the models that incorporated them. In the years that followed, variations of the structured analysis approach were suggested by Page-Jones, Gane and Sarson, and many others. In every instance, the method focused on information systems applications and did not provide an adequate notation to address the control and behavioral aspects of real-time engineering problems.

By the mid-1980s, real-time "extensions" were introduced by Ward and Mellor and later by Hatley and Pirbhai . These extensions resulted in a more robust analysis method that could be applied effectively to engineering problems. Attempts to develop one consistent notation have been suggested [BRU88], and modernized treatments have been published to accommodate the use of CASE tools .