Larry Constantine

Last updated
Larry Constantine
Larry Constantine.jpg
Born (1943-02-14) February 14, 1943 (age 79)
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater MIT Sloan School of Management (S.B., 1967)
Known for Structured Design
structured systems analysis and design method
Awards Jolt Award
Stevens Award
Simon Rockower Award
Scientific career
Fields Computer science
Institutions University of Madeira, Portugal
Notes
Writes fiction under pen name, Lior Samson

Larry LeRoy Constantine (born 1943) is an American software engineer, professor in the Center for Exact Sciences and Engineering at the University of Madeira Portugal, and considered one of the pioneers of computing. [1] He has contributed numerous concepts and techniques forming the foundations of modern practice in software engineering and applications design and development. [2]

Contents

Biography

Constantine grew up in Anoka, Minnesota, and graduated from Anoka High School in 1961 after being active in debate and thespians as well as other extra curricular activities. He was named "Most Likely to Succeed" by his classmates. Constantine received an S.B. in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1967 with a specialization in information systems and psychology. He received a certificate in family therapy 1973 from the Boston Family Institute, two-year post graduate training program. [3]

Constantine started his working career as a technical aid/programmer at M.I.T. Laboratory for Nuclear Science in 1963. From 1963 to 1966 he was a staff consultant and programmer/analyst at C E I R, Inc. From 1966 to 1968 he was president of the Information & Systems Institute, Inc. In 1967 also he became a postgraduate program instructor at the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania. From 1968 to 1972 he was a faculty member of the I.B.M. Systems Research Institute. [3]

In 1973 he became director of research, Concord, Massachusetts Family Service Society. From 1973 to 1980 he was assistant clinical professor of psychiatry, Tufts University, School of Medicine. Until 1987 he was assistant professor of human development and family studies (adjunct), University of Connecticut. From 1984 to 1986 he was also clinical supervisor, adolescent and family intervention, LUK, Inc., Fitchburg, Massachusetts. From 1987 to 1993 he also worked as independent consultant. He remained a chief scientist, principal consultant, Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd since 1993. From 1994-1999 he was professor of information technology, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. [3] Since 2006 has been a professor in the mathematics and engineering department at the University of Madeira Portugal, where he headed the Laboratory for Usage-centered Software Engineering (LabUSE), A former research center dedicated to study the human aspects of modern software engineering before becoming Institute Fellow at the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute [4] in 2010.

In 1999 Constantine received the Jolt Award for Product Excellence, best book of 1999 for his "Software for Use". In 2001 he received the Platinum Award of Excellence (first place), Performance-Centered Design Competition 2001: Siemens AG, STEP-7 Lite. In 2006 he was recognized as a Distinguished Engineer by the Association for Computing Machinery, and in 2007 he was made a Fellow of the ACM. He is the 2009 recipient of the Stevens Award for "outstanding contributions to the literature or practice of methods for software and systems development." He received a Simon Rockower Award in 2011 from the American Jewish Press Association. [5]

Work

Constantine specializes in the human side of software development. His published work includes the influential classic text, Structured Design, written with Ed Yourdon, and the award-winning "Software for Use", written with Lucy Lockwood. His contributions to the practice of software development began in 1968 with his pioneering work in "Modular programming" concepts.

Constantine was the primary force behind the discipline of Structured Design, in his book of the same name. The key features of Structured Design, such as Structure Chart, the Data flow diagram are all commonly used and taught worldwide.

Structured design

Constantine, who learned programming at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began his professional career in computers with a summer job at Scientific Computing, at the time a subsidiary of Control Data Corporation, in Minneapolis. He went on to full-time work at MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science, where he wrote routines for analyzing spark chamber photographs, and then to C-E-I-R, Inc., where he worked on economics simulations, business applications, project management tools, and programming languages.

While still an undergraduate at MIT he began work on what was to become structured design, formed his first consulting company, and taught in a postgraduate program at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School. The core of structured design, including structure charts and coupling and cohesion metrics, was substantially complete by 1968, when it was presented at the National Symposium on Modular Programming. He joined the faculty of IBM’s Systems Research Institute the same year, where he taught for four years and further refined his concepts.

As part of structured design, Constantine developed the concepts of cohesion (the degree to which the internal contents of a module are related) and coupling (the degree to which a module depends upon other modules). [6] These two concepts have been influential in the development of software engineering, and stand alone from structured design as significant contributions in their own right. They have proved foundational in areas ranging from software design to software metrics, and indeed have passed into the vernacular of the discipline.

Constantine also developed methodologies that combine human-computer-interaction design with software engineering. One methodology, usage-centered design, is the topic of his 1999 book with Lucy Lockwood, "Software For Use". This is a third significant contribution to the field, being both well used in professional practice and the subject of academic study, and taught in a number of human-computer interface courses and universities around the world. His work on human-computer interaction was influential for techniques like essential use cases and usage-centered design, which are widely used for building interactive software systems.

Family therapy

Constantine trained under family therapy pioneers David Kantor and Fred and Bunny Duhl at the Boston Family Institute, completing a two-year postgraduate certificate program in 1973. From 1973 to 1980 he was an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry in the Tufts University School of Medicine training family therapists and supervising trainees at Boston State Hospital. He became a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and later a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Massachusetts and was designated an approved supervisor by the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy.

His contributions to theory and research in family therapy and human systems theory were summarized in Family Paradigms (Guilford Press, 1986), a book heralded at the time as “one of the finest theoretical books yet published in the family therapy field” [7] and “among the most significant developments of the decade.” [8] This work has also seen application in organization development.

He and his wife at the time, Joan Constantine, also researched and practiced group marriage in the 1970s. They created the Family Tree organization to promote healthy non-monogamous families. They collaboratively authored a book on the subject in 1974, Group Marriage: A Study of Contemporary Multilateral Marriage (Collier Books, 1974). [9]

Patents

US Patents: 7010753 Anticipating drop acceptance indication; 7055105 Drop-enabled tabbed dialog; 8161026 Inexact date entry

Music

Although he played piano, saxophone, and violin as a child, Constantine gave up instrumental performance for singing. He sang with the award-winning Burtones ensemble while a student at MIT, is a twelve-year veteran and alum of the semi-professional Zamir Chorale of Boston, and is a member of the Zachor Choral Ensemble, a Boston-based group dedicated to keeping alive the memory of the Holocaust through music.

Constantine is also a composer with several major works to his credit. He studied theory and composition under George Litterst [10] and Stephan Peisch [11] at the New England Conservatory. His first commissioned work, Concerto Grosso No. 1 in G-minor, “Serendipity,” was premiered by the Rockford (Illinois) Pops Orchestra on 9 July 1981. His choral work, “No Hidden Meanings,” based on a text by psychologist Sheldon Kopp, was commissioned by the American Humanist Association and premiered at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium, 20 June 1982.

His choral setting of the traditional Shehechiyanu blessing was premiered April 18, 2010 by HaShirim at the groundbreaking for Temple Ahavat Achim in Gloucester, Massachusetts. [12]

Fiction

Constantine, an active (professional) member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, is the author of numerous short stories, mostly published under several pseudonyms. He edited Infinite Loop (Miller Freeman Books, 1993), an anthology of science fiction by writers in the computer field described in the Midwest Book Review [13] as "quite simply one of the best anthologies to appear in recent years.”

Writing under the pen name Lior Samson, [14] Constantine is the author of several critically acclaimed [15] political thrillers, including Bashert, The Dome, Web Games, The Rosen Singularity, Chipset, Gasline, and Flight Track. His other fiction includes Avalanche Warning (Gesher Press, 2013), The Four-Color Puzzle (Gesher Press, 2013), and Requisite Variety: Collected Short Fiction (Gesher Press, 2011). His first novel, Bashert, was included in a time capsule at MIT by the class of 1967 for its 50th reunion. [16] The time capsule is slated to be opened in 2067.

Publications

Constantine has more than 200 published papers to his credit, as well as 22 books. [17] A selection:

See also

Related Research Articles

<i>Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs</i> Computer science textbook

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) is a computer science textbook by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman. It is known as the "Wizard Book" in hacker culture. It teaches fundamental principles of computer programming, including recursion, abstraction, modularity, and programming language design and implementation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Terry Winograd</span> American professor

Terry Allen Winograd is an American professor of computer science at Stanford University, and co-director of the Stanford Human–Computer Interaction Group. He is known within the philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence fields for his work on natural language using the SHRDLU program.

Michael Anthony Jackson is a British computer scientist, and independent computing consultant in London, England. He is also a visiting research professor at the Open University in the UK.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to software engineering:

In computer programming, cohesion refers to the degree to which the elements inside a module belong together. In one sense, it is a measure of the strength of relationship between the methods and data of a class and some unifying purpose or concept served by that class. In another sense, it is a measure of the strength of relationship between the class's methods and data themselves.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of software engineering</span>

The history of software engineering begins in the 1960s. Writing software has evolved into a profession concerned with how best to maximize the quality of software and of how to create it. Quality can refer to how maintainable software is, to its stability, speed, usability, testability, readability, size, cost, security, and number of flaws or "bugs", as well as to less measurable qualities like elegance, conciseness, and customer satisfaction, among many other attributes. How best to create high quality software is a separate and controversial problem covering software design principles, so-called "best practices" for writing code, as well as broader management issues such as optimal team size, process, how best to deliver software on time and as quickly as possible, work-place "culture", hiring practices, and so forth. All this falls under the broad rubric of software engineering.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Yourdon</span> American software engineer and pioneer in the software engineering methodology

Edward Nash Yourdon was an American software engineer, computer consultant, author and lecturer, and software engineering methodology pioneer. He was one of the lead developers of the structured analysis techniques of the 1970s and a co-developer of both the Yourdon/Whitehead method for object-oriented analysis/design in the late 1980s and the Coad/Yourdon methodology for object-oriented analysis/design in the 1990s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Coupling (computer programming)</span> Degree of interdependence between software modules

In software engineering, coupling is the degree of interdependence between software modules; a measure of how closely connected two routines or modules are; the strength of the relationships between modules.

Conway's law is an adage that states organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure. It is named after the computer programmer Melvin Conway, who introduced the idea in 1967. His original wording was:

Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Structured analysis and design technique</span>

Structured analysis and design technique (SADT) is a systems engineering and software engineering methodology for describing systems as a hierarchy of functions. SADT is a structured analysis modelling language, which uses two types of diagrams: activity models and data models. It was developed in the late 1960s by Douglas T. Ross, and was formalized and published as IDEF0 in 1981.

Peter Coad is a software entrepreneur and author of books on programming. He is notable for his role in defining what have come to be known as the UML colors, a color-coded notation chiefly useful for adding breadth and depth to a design, using four major archetypes.

Albert F. Case Jr. is an American software engineer and one of the leaders in the development of computer-aided software engineering (CASE) technologies and system development methodologies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wayne Stevens (software engineer)</span> American computer scientist

Wayne P. Stevens was an American software engineer, consultant, author, pioneer, and advocate of the practical application of software methods and tools.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Structured analysis</span>

In software engineering, structured analysis (SA) and structured design (SD) are methods for analyzing business requirements and developing specifications for converting practices into computer programs, hardware configurations, and related manual procedures.

Douglas Taylor "Doug" Ross was an American computer scientist pioneer, and chairman of SofTech, Inc. He is most famous for originating the term CAD for computer-aided design, and is considered to be the father of Automatically Programmed Tools (APT), a programming language to drive numerical control in manufacturing. His later work focused on a pseudophilosophy he developed and named Plex.

Usage-centered design is an approach to user interface design based on a focus on user intentions and usage patterns. It analyzes users in terms of the roles they play in relation to systems and employs abstract (essential) use cases for task analysis. It derives visual and interaction design from abstract prototypes based on the understanding of user roles and task cases.

Peopleware is a term used to refer to one of the three core aspects of computer technology, the other two being hardware and software. Peopleware can refer to anything that has to do with the role of people in the development or use of computer software and hardware systems, including such issues as developer productivity, teamwork, group dynamics, the psychology of programming, project management, organizational factors, human interface design, and human–machine interaction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)</span> United States software engineer (born 1936)

Margaret Heafield Hamilton is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo program. She later founded two software companies—Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Kenneth T. Orr was an American software engineer, executive and consultant, known for his contributions in the field of software engineering to structured analysis and with the Warnier/Orr diagram.

Agile usability engineering is a method created from a combination of agile software development and usability engineering practices. Agile usability engineering attempts to apply the principles of rapid and iterative development to the field of user interface design.

References

  1. John A. N. Lee, International Bibliographical Dictionary of Computer Pioneers. Routledge, 1995, pp212-214 ( ISBN   978-1-884964-47-3).
  2. Larry Constantine, Usage Centered Design Archived 2008-10-10 at the Wayback Machine at qconlondon.com. 2007.
  3. 1 2 3 Larry.Constantine. Accessed 26 Nov. 2008. Archived 2008-12-21 at the Wayback Machine homepage University of Madeira.
  4. "Madeira-ITI". Archived from the original on 2017-08-09. Retrieved 2010-08-12.
  5. "Welcome to the American Jewish Press Association Website". Archived from the original on 2013-08-12. Retrieved 2011-07-11.
  6. Lee, International Bibliographical Dictionary of Computer Pioneers.
  7. Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books
  8. Burr, W. R. Journal of Marriage and the Family Vol. 49, No. 4 (Nov., 1987), pp. 948
  9. Constantine, Larry and Joan (1974). Group Marriage: A Study of Contemporary Multilateral Marriage. Collier Books. ISBN   978-0020759102.
  10. George Litterst
  11. Stephan Peisch Archived 2011-07-16 at the Wayback Machine
  12. Performance of Shehechianu by Larry Constantine, HaShirim, Gloucester, MA. on YouTube
  13. Midwest Book Review
  14. Lior Samson, Novelist
  15. "Bookviews by Alan Caruba: Bookviews - January 2011". 30 December 2010.
  16. "A grand design: the life of W.A. Dwiggins - The Boston Globe". The Boston Globe .
  17. Larry L. Constantine. List of publications from the DBLP Bibliography.]