A short biography of Grady Booch

Grady Booch is an American Software Engineer who was born in 1955 in Texas, United States. To begin with, in 1977 he earned his bachelor’s degree from the United States Air Force Academy followed by a master’s degree two years later from the University of California, Santa Barbara in the subject of electrical engineering (Völter 2007). Booch’s first experience in programming was within IBM when he got speaking to a salesman who gifted him a Fortran manual which taught him some programming and sparked an interest for him which subsequently led him to get a computer to use for programming. He is most well-known for his work with Ivar Jacobsen and James Rumbaugh in developing the Unified Modelling Language. Initially, while working at Rational Software (a company owned by IBM), he developed the ‘Booch method’ which was widely used in software engineering for object-oriented analysis and design (Martin 1995). Object-oriented analysis and design is used in the design and analysis of a system or application using the object-oriented paradigm and some concepts like visual modelling (Rouse 2015). After this, his work in developing the Booch Method was used alongside work by Jacobsen and Rumbaugh to develop the Unified Modelling Language which is a visual modelling language used by software developers to visualise and construct new systems. Essentially, Unified Modelling Language is used to show how a system works in the form of a diagram. This includes showing how different entities interact with each other so can be used in many different business scenarios, especially within software development. Currently Booch is Chief Scientist for Software Engineering for IBM research where he leads both research and development to do with embodied cognition. He has also been inducted as a fellow in various organisations including IBM and in 2012 was awarded the Lovelace Medal from the British Computer Society for his “innovative work in software architecture, software engineering and collaborative environments” (Stal 2012).