The central principles are software development based on formal methods, incremental implementation under statistical quality control, and statistically sound testing.
The cleanroom process was originally developed by Harlan Mills and several of his colleagues including Alan Hevner at IBM.
Demonstration projects within the military began in the early 1990s.
[2] Recent work on the cleanroom process has examined fusing cleanroom with the automated verification capabilities provided by specifications expressed in CSP.
The name "cleanroom" was chosen to evoke the cleanrooms used in the electronics industry to prevent the introduction of defects during the fabrication of semiconductors.