David Parnas is an early pioneer of software engineering who developed the concept of module design which is the foundation of object oriented programming today. He is also noted for his advocacy of social responsibility. Parnas earned his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University, and worked there as a professor for many years. He also taught at the University of North Carolina, the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt, and the University of Victoria. He then went to McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He currently works at the University of Limerick in Limerick, Ireland. David also earned a professional engineering license in Canada and was one of the first to apply traditional engineering principles to software design.

Social Responsibility

Parnas took a public stand against the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka star wars) in the mid 1980s, arguing that it would be impossible to write an application that was free enough from errors to be safely deployed.

Awards and honors

• ACM "Best Paper" Award 1979
• Two "Most Influential Paper" awards International Conference on Software Engineering (date unknown)
• ACM SIGSOFT's "Outstanding Research" award 1998

Quotations

...it is almost always incorrect to begin the decomposition of a system into modules on the basis of a flowchart. We propose instead that one begins with a list of difficult design decisions or design decisions which are likely to change. Each module is then designed to hide such a decision from the others.

External links

• On The Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules
• XP Versus MTP: The Limits of Extreme Programming
• Software Fundamentals: Collected Papers by David L. Parnas at Addison Wesley online bookstore