TOOLS Component and Object Technology Award

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Richard Mitchell, and I am chair of the programme committee for TOOLS Europe.

I am delighted to have been asked by Bertrand Meyer to award the very first TOOLS Components and Objects Prize. The prize is to be awarded annually, and will "honor seminal contributions to the development of object and component technology."

And that is exactly what the award's first recipient, Professor David Parnas, has made - seminal contributions to the development of object and component technology.

David has published more than 200 papers over the last 30 years or so. His early work on information hiding and program familiar is still relevant today. He has contributed many valuable insights into the process of building complex systems, particularly through his work on such projects as the A7, and the Darlington Nuclear Plant, which includes work on the effective use of mathematics in software development.

If I might add a personal note, I believe David deserves our applause for the courage and professional integrity he displayed by publically exposing the flaws in the rationale for the Star Wars programme. I should like to thank him. [Applause]

Returning to the technical arena, David has also made important contributions in other areas, for example, in project management, with his work on why you should fake a rational design process.

David is the Director of the Software Engineering Program at McMaster University in Canada. He has held professorships at top universities in Victoria, Darmstadt in Germany, North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Carnegie Mellon, and Maryland. He has BS, MS and PhD degrees from Carnegie Mellon, and has honorary doctorates from ETH in Zurich and the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.

It gives me very great pleasure to award the first TOOLS Components and Objects Prize to Dr. David Parnas. [Applause]