My background is 30 years of experience with industrial software systems development. I was on the team that produced the Simula complier for the DEC-10 in 1973-74. This is in fact the most successful project I have ever worked in—eight people doing state-of-the-art development for nearly two years without so much as a temporary slip on the fixed budget and time schedule.
It was great fun, and gave me a totally unrealistic view regarding the standard of the typical industrial software project. Over the years to come reality would force me to revise that view with a vengeance, and I became interested in general principles of software engineering that could perhaps help industrial projects approach the standards that I knew was possible.
After working mostly with embedded real-time systems, I participated 1981-86 in a joint project between Enea and the computer science department of Stockhom University to do research in the area of software engineering. As part of the venture, we acquired the first commercial Unix system in Sweden to be used for trying out our research ideas in real industrial projects at Enea. The work resulted 1986 in Ph D theses for myself and my colleague on the project, Bo Steinholtz.
While heading a methods department at Enea for a couple of years, I came across articles in 1987 by Bertrand Meyer about Eiffel and Design by Contract, and was immediately hooked. I attended his first European seminar in Paris that same year and gave a two hour talk at Enea, which was received with great interest by the consultants. We managed to obtain company funding, Enea became official Eiffel distributor in Sweden, and I assumed the technical responsibility for introducing the ideas to Swedish industry and for building a group of object-oriented experts at Enea.
During this period, I acted as reviewer for several of Bertrand Meyer's books and also got to know him and his family personally. When Jean-Marc Nerson, then head of the Eiffel compiler development at ISE, presented early ideas on BON, I was immediately interested in collaboration. The literature so far on the emerging subject of methods for object-oriented analysis and design had been less than convincing, to put it mildly.
This lead to the publication of the book "Seamless Object-Oriented Software Architecture" in 1994. During the period 1992-98 I presented nine BON-tutorials at TOOLS Conferences around the world, as well as tutorials on the database framework MRF whose design is described in the last case study of the book.
I have been fortunate enough to be able to work with Eiffel in industrial projects for the past ten years, and I am currently a member of the ECMA TC39-TG4 working group on standardization of the Eiffel language.
Publications:
"Automatic Generation of Make Dependencies", Software Practice & Experience, vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 575-585, June 1984
"Control of Evolving Software Systems: a Language-Independent Database Approach", Ph D dissertation, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, May 1986 (jointly with Bo Steinholtz)
"Automatic Identification of Software System Differences", IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng., vol 13, no. 4, pp. 493-497, April 1987, (co-authored with Bo Steinholtz)
"Automating the Development of Syntax Tree Generators for an Evolving Language", Proc. Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems (TOOLS 8, Santa Barbara, Aug. 1992), Prentice Hall, pp. 185-195 (co-authored with Per Grape)
"Seamless Object-Oriented Software Architecture", Prentice Hall, 1994 (co-authored with Jean-Marc Nerson)
"Reversibility in Software Engineering", IEEE Computer, vol. 29, no. 9, September 1996, pp. 93-95
"Business Object Notation (BON)", chapter 10 in "Handbook of Object Technology", Zaba Zamir (ed.), CRC Press 1998, pp. 10.1-10.12