Cybersecurity
Stephen Cross: Crusader for Sensible Software
His quest: To spark a major technical -- and cultural -- shift to make coders more efficient and programs far more reliable
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A military man with a straight-arrow demeanor, Stephen Cross hardly seems a technology heretic. Yet from his perch as the director of the influential Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Cross is spreading the seeds of a quiet revolution in the software business.
His quest is to make writing software as routine -- some might say as boring -- as building bridges or houses. And that runs against the grain of software's traditional maverick culture of lone wolf programmers and a system that prides itself on rebuilding products from the ground up every few years.