Michael A. Jackson (computer scientist)

Last updated

Michael Anthony Jackson (born 16 February 1936) 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. [1]

Contents

Biography

Born in Birmingham to Montagu M. Jackson and Bertha (Green) Jackson, Jackson was educated at Harrow School in Harrow, London, England. There he was taught by Christopher Strachey and wrote his first program under Strachey's guidance. From 1954 to 1958, he studied classics (known as "Greats") at Merton College, Oxford; [2] a fellow student, two years ahead of him, was C. A. R. Hoare. They shared an interest in logic, which was studied as part of Greats at Oxford.

After his graduation in 1961, Jackson started as computer science designer and consultant for Maxwell Stamp Associates in London. Here he designed, coded and tested his first programs for IBM and Honeywell computers, working in assembler. There Jackson found his calling, as he recollected in 2000: "Although I was a careful designer — drawing meticulous flowcharts before coding — and a conscientious tester, I realised that program design was hard and the results likely to be erroneous..." [3] Information system design was in need of a structured approach.

In 1964, Jackson joined the new consultancy firm John Hoskyns and Company in London, before founding his own company Michael Jackson Systems Limited in 1971. In the 1960s, he had started his search for a "more reliable and systematic way of programming." [3] He contributed to the emerging modular programming movement, meeting Larry Constantine, George H. Mealy and several others on a 1968 symposium. [3] In the 1970s, Jackson developed Jackson Structured Programming (JSP). In the 1980s, with John Cameron, he developed Jackson System Development (JSD). Then, in the 1990s, he developed the Problem Frames Approach.

As a part-time researcher at AT&T Labs Research, in collaboration with Pamela Zave, Jackson created "Distributed Feature Composition", [4] a virtual architecture for specification and implementation of telecommunication services.

Jackson received the Stevens Award for Software Development Methods in 1997. [5] and British Computer Society Lovelace Medal in 1998. He received the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award [6] in 2001.

In 1961, Jackson married Judith Wendy Blackburn; [2] they have four sons, one of whom, Daniel, is also a computer scientist based at MIT. [7]

Work

Jackson has developed a series of methods. Each of these methods covers a wider scope than the previous one, and builds on ideas that appeared, but were not fully developed, in the previous one. Reading his books in sequence allows you to follow the evolution of his thinking.

Jackson Structured Programming

Jackson Structured Programming (JSP) was the first software development method that Jackson developed. It is a program design method, and was described in his book Principles of Program Design. [8] JSP covers the design of individual programs, but not systems.

Jackson System Development

The Jackson System Development (JSD) was the second software development method that Jackson developed. [9] JSD is a system development method not just for individual programs, but for entire systems. JSD is most readily applicable to information systems, but it can easily be extended to the development of real-time embedded systems. JSD was described in his book System Development.

Problem Frames Approach

Problem Analysis or the Problem Frames Approach was the third software development method that Jackson developed. It concerns itself with aspects of developing all kinds of software, not just information systems. It was first sketched in his book Software Requirements and Specifications, and described much more fully in his book Problem Frames. The First International Workshop on Applications and Advances in Problem Frames [10] was held as part of ICSE’04 held in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Publications

Michael Jackson's books include:

Many of his essays have been collected, along with research papers relating to his work, in the book:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Software architecture</span> High level structures of a software system

Software architecture is the set of structures needed to reason about a software system and the discipline of creating such structures and systems. Each structure comprises software elements, relations among them, and properties of both elements and relations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jackson structured programming</span>

Jackson structured programming (JSP) is a method for structured programming developed by British software consultant Michael A. Jackson and described in his 1975 book Principles of Program Design. The technique of JSP is to analyze the data structures of the files that a program must read as input and produce as output, and then produce a program design based on those data structures, so that the program control structure handles those data structures in a natural and intuitive way.

In computer science, formal methods are mathematically rigorous techniques for the specification, development, analysis, and verification of software and hardware systems. The use of formal methods for software and hardware design is motivated by the expectation that, as in other engineering disciplines, performing appropriate mathematical analysis can contribute to the reliability and robustness of a design.

Software design is the process of conceptualizing how a software system will work before it is implemented or modified. Software design also refers to the direct result of the design process – the concepts of how the software will work which consists of both design documentation and undocumented concepts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bertrand Meyer</span> French computer scientist

Bertrand Meyer is a French academic, author, and consultant in the field of computer languages. He created the Eiffel programming language and the idea of design by contract.

A modeling language is any artificial language that can be used to express data, information or knowledge or systems in a structure that is defined by a consistent set of rules. The rules are used for interpretation of the meaning of components in the structure of a programing language.

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

Jackson System Development (JSD) is a linear software development methodology developed by Michael A. Jackson and John Cameron in the 1980s.

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

The history of software engineering begins around 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.

In computer science, formal specifications are mathematically based techniques whose purpose are to help with the implementation of systems and software. They are used to describe a system, to analyze its behavior, and to aid in its design by verifying key properties of interest through rigorous and effective reasoning tools. These specifications are formal in the sense that they have a syntax, their semantics fall within one domain, and they are able to be used to infer useful information.

Harlan D. Mills was Professor of Computer Science at the Florida Institute of Technology and founder of Software Engineering Technology, Inc. of Vero Beach, Florida. Mills' contributions to software engineering have had a profound and enduring effect on education and industrial practice. Since earning his Ph.D. in Mathematics at Iowa State University in 1952, Mills led a distinguished career.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Programming language theory</span> Branch of computer science

Programming language theory (PLT) is a branch of computer science that deals with the design, implementation, analysis, characterization, and classification of formal languages known as programming languages. Programming language theory is closely related to other fields including mathematics, software engineering, and linguistics. There are a number of academic conferences and journals in the area.

In computer programming, flow-based programming (FBP) is a programming paradigm that defines applications as networks of black box processes, which exchange data across predefined connections by message passing, where the connections are specified externally to the processes. These black box processes can be reconnected endlessly to form different applications without having to be changed internally. FBP is thus naturally component-oriented.

<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.

Problem analysis or the problem frames approach is an approach to software requirements analysis. It was developed by British software consultant Michael A. Jackson in the 1990s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Jackson (computer scientist)</span>

Daniel Jackson is a professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is the principal designer of the Alloy modelling language, and author of the books Software Abstractions: Logic, Language, and Analysis and The Essence of Software. He leads the Software Design Group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

The Requirements Engineering Specialist Group (RESG) is a Specialist Group of the British Computer Society. It runs events on all aspects of Requirements.

Pamela Zave is an American computer scientist now working at Princeton University. She is known for her work on requirements engineering, telecommunication services, and protocol modeling and verification, and is now working on network architecture. She was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2001, and was the 2017 recipient of the Harlan D. Mills Award from the IEEE Computer Society.

References

  1. ↑ Michael Jackson (not the singer) Consultancy & Research in Software Development. Accessed 24 April 2009.
  2. 1 2 Levens, R.G.C., ed. (1964). Merton College Register 1900–1964. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. p. 457.
  3. 1 2 3 Jackson, Michael (April–June 2000). "The Origins of JSP and JSD: a Personal Recollection". IEEE Annals of Software Engineering. 22 (2): 61–63, 66.
  4. ↑ Distributed Feature Composition - Accessed 28 August 2018
  5. ↑ Previous Stevens Recipients Archived 7 March 2009 at the Wayback Machine . Accessed 24 April 2009.
  6. ↑ "Outstanding Research Award". SIGSOFT . Retrieved 1 April 2024.
  7. ↑ Jackson, Daniel. "Daniel Jackson". CSAIL Faculty Pages. Retrieved 9 January 2009.
  8. ↑ Jackson, M. A. (1975). Principles of Program Design. Academic Press, 1975
  9. ↑ A System development method Archived 6 February 2012 at the Wayback Machine . M. A. Jackson, 1982
  10. ↑ "First International Workshop on Applications and Advances in Problem Frames" . Retrieved 24 April 2009.{{cite web}}: |archive-date= requires |archive-url= (help); Unknown parameter |archive-url A= ignored (help)CS1 maint: url-status (link)
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.