As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.
Dave Parnas Quotes
Whenever anyone says, 'theoretically,' they really mean, 'not really.'
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| Birth: | 10th February, 1941 |
| Nationality: | Canadian |
| Profession: | Software Engineer |
About
Parnas earned his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University in electrical engineering. Parnas also earned a professional engineering license in Canada and was one of the first to apply traditional engineering principles to software design. He worked there as a professor for many years. He also taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (U.S.), the Technische Universität Darmstadt (Germany), the University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada), Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and University of Limerick.
In modular design, his double dictum of high cohesion within modules and loose coupling between modules is fundamental to modular design in software. However, in Parnas's seminal 1972 paper On the Criteria to Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules, this dictum is expressed in terms of information hiding, and the terms cohesion and coupling are not used.
Dr. Parnas took a public stand against the US Strategic Defense Initiative in the mid 1980s, arguing that it would be impossible to write an application of sufficient quality that it could be trusted to prevent a nuclear attack. He has also been in the forefront of those urging the professionalization of "software engineering". Dr. Parnas is also a heavy promoter of ethics in the field of software engineering.
Dr. Parnas has joined the group of scientists which openly criticize the number-of-publications-based approach towards ranking academic production. On his November 2007 paper Stop the Numbers Game, he elaborates on several reasons on why the current number-based academic evaluation system used in many fields by universities all over the world is flawed and, instead of generating more advance of the sciences, it leads to knowledge stagnation.
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