Thirteen years ago, Watts Humphrey, a 27-year veteran of IBM who is now a fellow of the Pentagon-financed Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University -- developed a methodology for designing quality and reliability into software products. The idea at its core is that high quality has to be designed into software development and manufacture from the start; it cannot just be "tested in" at the end of the process.

So what about those companies that whine that giving consumers bug-free products would mean raising their prices by as much as 50 percent? Quality-focused software development can dramatically shrink overall development costs, says Humphrey. The few American companies that have adopted his techniques show astonishing results. For instance, at Raytheon Electronics Systems, where the cost of quality was almost 60 percent of total production costs in 1990, that tab had fallen to 15 percent by 1996 and has since sunk below 10 percent.

Humphrey believes that there is no excuse for glitchy software. "We should stop talking about software bugs as if they were mere annoyances," he has said. "They are defects and should be so labeled." Unlike software companies, he said, "Many other industries produce high quality products and take full responsibility for their defects." Though commercial aircraft are, like computers, extremely complex hardware and software systems, their makers do not duck responsibility for their flaws.

But Humphrey has been ignored by the American personal computer industry. Many technologists note an eerie parallel to the American automobile industry's disdain, in the 1950s and 1960s, for the quality-boosting methodologies invented by W. Edwards Deming -- on which Humphrey's technique is closely modeled. And they predict that someday soon, the computer industry of some foreign country that embraces Humphrey's ideas will do to its American competitors exactly what Japanese car makers did to Detroit.

Bryan Pfaffenberger, on the faculty of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia, is one of many experts reminding us that the Japanese auto industry thrived by giving Deming's ideas a home:

"Japanese car makers took Deming's teachings to heart," writes Pfaffenberger, "and they started making some exceptionally fine automobiles. What's more, they were cheap. The result? Japanese auto makers grabbed nearly a third of the U.S. market and most of the international market."

Already there is one foreign country venerating Humphrey, 73, the way the Japanese did Deming. India has 22 of the 38 software companies around the world that have adopted his methodology and are certified to have met the Software Engineering Institute's highest -- "Level 5" -- standards for quality. (Four American companies, including Perot Systems and Citicorp, own Level 5 subsidiaries in India.) Last year, the Indian government and several Indian companies founded the Watts Humphrey Software Quality Institute in Chennai, in South India, where a contract software development firm called Advanced Information Systems is churning out software with just 0.05 defects per 1,000 lines of code -- "better than the space shuttle's software," Pfaffenberger says -- and has, as a result, doubled its profits.

Critics of Humphrey's high-quality software regimen -- which imposes strict performance measures on programmers -- protest that it cramps creativity. "[A] fine expression of 19th-century ideas about scientific management ... It's a good thing for the technology that so few people are disciplined in the way Humphrey proposes," grumbles a techie reviewer of one book by the quality expert, "A Discipline for Software Engineering," at Amazon.com.

The unwillingness of programmers to submit to micro-management might be understandable from a psychological perspective. But any victim of defect-riddled personal computers -- which is to say, virtually every user of these machines -- is unlikely to have much sympathy for their feelings on that score. Speaking out on our behalf is a growing band of respected computer scientists and engineers who argue that the era of playful creativity governing the design and manufacture of PCs is over, and that it has got to give way to one in which computers are seen by their creators as being more like bridges and tunnels than, say, the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright or Le Corbusier.

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