Stevens Award on Software Development Methods

Nicholas Zvegintzov will be receiving the 2007 Wayne Stevens Award and presenting the Stevens Lecture on Software Development Methods at CSMR 2007.

Nicholas Zvegintzov to receive the 14th Stevens Award

Nicholas Zvegintzov, founder of the Software Management Network, has been named as the 14th recipient of the international Stevens Award and will give the Stevens Lecture on Software Development Methods. The title of his lecture will be "Then a Miracle Occurs".

The presentation and lecture will take place on Thursday afternoon, 22 March 2007 in Amsterdam, Netherlands at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen). The Stevens Lecture will be a plenary session in the 11th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR 2007).

The Stevens Award was created to recognize outstanding worldwide contributions to the literature or practice of methods for software and systems development. The lecture presentations focus on lessons learned and challenges, with an emphasis on advancing or analyzing the state of software methods and their direction for the future.

This prestigious award lecture is named in memory of Wayne Stevens (1944-1993), a highly-respected consultant, author, pioneer, and advocate of the practical application of software methods and tools. His 1974 IBM Systems Journal article "Structured Design" was the first published on the topic and has been widely reprinted. Stevens was the author of the books: Software Design: Concepts and Methods (Prentice-Hall Intl, 1991) and Using Structured Design (Wiley, 1981). His last article "Data Flow Analysis and Design" appears in the Encyclopedia of Software Engineering (Wiley, 1994). Stevens was the chief architect of application development methodology for IBM's consulting group.

Nicholas Zvegintzov

Nicholas Zvegintzov will be recognized "for his career leading the practice and understanding of software maintenance across the international software community".

For the last quarter century, Zvegintzov has been an international leader and expert on the management of existing software systems, including functional modification, adaptation, testing and documentation. He was founder and Editor-in-Chief of the newsletter Software Management News (1983-1994), considered an essential and widely-trusted resource on the emerging software industry and on practical issues of dealing with an installed software base. Since 1995, he has been president of Software Management Network (SMN), a publishing, consulting, and teaching group that specialized in techniques and technology to manage installed software systems.

Nicholas Zvegintzov has been a keen observer and pragmatic analyst of the practical issues of software and systems implementation and sustainment. Through his newsletters, tutorial presentations at conferences, and papers, his observations have been critical to the industry's understanding of software maintenance in practice. He has kept in close touch with users, managers, practitioners, and researchers responsible for the future of existing software, and has served as a unique channel of communication between these communities.

His publications include the landmark collection Tutorial on Software Maintenance with co-author Girish Parikh (IEEE Computer Society Press) and Software Management Technology Reference Guide (SMN), a comprehensive guide to the technology for management, analysis, integration, testing, correction, and support of a software portfolio. He was General Chair of the IEEE's International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM) in 1985 and has served on the ICSM Program Committee each year since 1983.

Zvegintzov received a B.A. and M.A. from Oxford University in Experimental Psychology and Philosophy. From 1962 to 1969, he was researcher in computer science and artificial intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. From 1969 to 1979, he programmed, designed, upgraded, and documented applications systems. In 1979, he established a full-time software management consulting practice.

Previous Stevens Award Recipients

The 13 prior recipients of the Stevens Award are: - Grady Booch (2006), for leadership in object-oriented analysis and the development of the Unified Modeling Language [UML] (USA); - Mary Shaw (2005), instrumental in the foundations of software architecture and software engineering education (USA); - Jim Highsmith (2005), advocate and promoter of agile and adaptive methods in software development and project management (USA); - Francois Bodart (2004), research leader in practical applications of systems development technologies (Belgium); - Manny Lehman (2003), authority on software evolution (United Kingdom); - Cordell Green (2002), founder and chairman of Kestrel Institute (USA); - Peter Chen (2001), advocate of entity-relationship modeling (USA); - Gerald Weinberg (2000), noted author on understanding how people and software technology work together (USA); - Tom DeMarco (1999), principal of Atlantic Systems Guild and noted analyst and authority on software project management, methods, and people processes (USA); - Tom McCabe (1998), software metrics expert and creator of cyclomatic complexity analysis (USA); - Michael Jackson (1997), creator of the Jackson Software Development methods (United Kingdom); - David Harel (1996), professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) and founder of i-Logix and the Statemate toolset; and, - Tony Wasserman (1995), founder and chairman of Interactive Development Environments and researcher on software tools (USA).

The Stevens Award and lecture is managed by the Reengineering Forum (REF) industry association. The award was founded by IWCASE, an international workshop association of users and developers of Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) technology. Wayne Stevens was a member of the IWCASE executive board.

Reference web sites:

CSMR conference: http://www.cs.vu.nl/csmr2007/

Stevens Award: http://reengineer.org/stevens/