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Computerworld - Grady Booch is chief scientist at IBMsRational Software Corp. unit and an IBM fellow who also holds the title free radical. His software development approach and the Unified Modeling Language, which he helped create, have been used to build the software that runs pacemakers, avionics in certain large airliners, antilock brake systems, and financial trading systems in the U.S., Europe and Asia.



How would you characterize the state of software development today? Software has been and will remain fundamentally hard. In every era, we find that there is a certain level of complexity we face. Today, a typical system tends to be continuously evolving. You never turn it off, [and] it tends to be distributed, multiplatform. That is a very different set of problems and forces than we faced five years ago.

Traditionally  were talking a few decades ago  you could think of software as something that IT guys did, and nobody else worried about it. Today, our civilization relies upon software.

Dossier

Name: Grady Booch Title: Chief scientist, IBMs Rational Software Corp. unit Location: Littleton, Colo. Favorite Web site: www.crooksandliars.com Favorite quote: “She said she usually cried at least once every day, not because she was sad, but because the world was so beautiful and life was so short.” — Brian Andreas Favorite technology he didn’t invent and IBM doesn’t sell: “The Macintosh. It is a beautiful piece of hardware.” Hobbies: Reading, playing harp, traveling and kayaking Favorite vice: Chocolate

All of a sudden, you wake up and say, I cant live without my cell phone. We, as software developers, build systems of incredible complexity, and yet our end users dont want to see that software.

Most of the interesting systems today are no longer just systems by themselves, but they tend to be systems of systems. It is the set of them working in harmony. We dont have a lot of good processes or analysis tools to really understand how those things behave. Many systems look dangerously fragile. The bad news is they are fragile. This is another force that will lead us to the next era of how we build software systems.



What have been the biggest advantages from IBMs 2003 acquisition of Rational, and what are some of the drawbacks about being part of IBM? Ive got much cooler business cards.

Now, were dealing with an organization that is two orders of magnitude larger and operating in businesses that [Rational] had no traction in.

It is really cool working with brilliant people. When the acquisition was first consummated, one of my first tasks was to manage the IBM/Rational research relationship. There are some really fascinating things going on there, dealing with static and dynamic analysis and collaboration. We have a team now looking at using virtual worlds for doing distributed software development.