The Best Influences on Software Engineering
An IEEE Software magazine article from 2000 lists the top 11 influences the editors thought made the biggest impact on Software Engineering in the last 50 years (PDF). Here's their list:

- Reviews and Inspections
- Information Hiding
- Incremental Development
- User Involvement
- Automated Revision Control
- Development Using the Internet
- Programming Languages Hall of Fame: Fortran, Cobol, Turbo Pascal, Visual Basic
- Capability Maturity Model for Software
- Object-Oriented Programming
- Component-Based Development
- Metrics and Measurement

The field of "usability engineering" has activites related to many of these influences:
- Heuristic inspection and expert reviews
- Information Hiding is much like the concept of progressive disclosure in user interface design
- Incremental design involves prototyping
- User involvement -- that's what UE is all about
- Usability testing and other types of evaluations are ways to gather metrics

Related:
Previous article: Web projects don't iterate, they use the waterfall method