Multi-Dimensional Software Families: Document Defined Partitions of a Set of Products
Professor David Lorge Parnas
Abstract

More than 30 years after it was first proposed that sets of closely related programs would be easier to maintain than a set of independently developed programs, the software industry is still struggling with the complex problem of making updates to collections of “almost alike” products. This talk has four themes:

• The program family concept is more general than the idea of software product lines and can be used even with programs that do not constitute a product line.
• Full exploitation of the program family concept requires explicit design effort before code is written, not just configuration management techniques afterwards.
• Full exploitation of the program family concept requires recognition that a set of programs can (and should) be partitioned into families in many ways, not just one.
• Precise documents can be used to characterize the families and subfamilies and contribute to maintaining a well-designed set of program products.

Bio

Professor David Lorge Parnas Parnas received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering - Systems and Communications Sciences from Carnegie Mellon University and honorary doctorates from the ETH in Zurich and the Catholic University of Louvain. Dr. Parnas is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He is licensed as a Professional Engineer in Ontario.

Dave was the first winner of the Norbert Wiener Prize from Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility. He has also received the FifF prize from Forum Informatiker für Frieden und Verantwortung in Germany. He won an ACM “Best Paper” Award in 1979, two “Most Influential Paper” awards from the International Conference on Software Engineering, the 1998 ACM SIGSOFT “Outstanding Research Award”, the IEEE CS’s “Practical Visionary Award” given in honor of the late Dr.Harlan Mills, and the “Component and Object Technology” Award presented at TOOLS99.

Recently, Parnas was proud to share the IEEE Computer Society’s sixtieth anniversary award with Professor Maurice Wilkes of Cambridge University. Parnas is the author of more than 250 papers and reports. Many of his papers have been repeatedly republished and some are considered classics. A collection of his papers can be found in: Hoffman, D.M., Weiss, D.M. (eds.), “Software Fundamentals: Collected Papers by David L. Parnas”, Addison-Wesley, 2001, 664 pgs., ISBN 0-201-70369-6.