The Computer Society will host a talk by Dr. David L. Parnas on "Software Aging" at RIT on September 23rd at 7PM in Room 76-1125.

To help those unfamilimiar with the RIT Campus please refer to the map of RIT.

Programs, like people, get old. We can't prevent aging, but we can understand its causes, take steps to limits its effects, temporarily reverse some of the damage it has caused, and prepare for the day when the software is no longer viable. A sign that the Software Engineering profession has matured will be that we lose our preoccupation with the first release and focus on the long term health of our products. Researchers and practitioners must change their perception of the problems of software development. Only then will Software Engineering deserve to be called Engineering.

David Lorge Parnas holds the NSERC/Bell Industrial Research Chair in Software Engineering in the McMaster University Faculty of Engineering's Computing and Software Department where he is Director of the Software Engineering Programme. He is also an associate member of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

He has been Professor at the University of Victoria, the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland.

He has also held non-academic positions advising Philips Computer Industry (Apeldoorn), the United States Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. and the IBM Federal Systems Division. At NRL, he instigated the Software Cost Reduction (A-7) Project, which develops and applies software technology to aircraft weapon systems. He has advised the Atomic Energy Control Board of Canada on the use of safety- critical real-time software at the Darlington Nuclear Gen- eration Station.

The author of more than 200 papers and reports, Dr. Parnas is interested in most aspects of computer system design.

In his teaching, as well as in his research, Dr. Parnas seeks to find a "middle road" between theory and practice, emphasising theory that can be applied to improve the quality of our products.

Professor Parnas received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, and honorary doctorates from the ETH in Zurich and the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.

Dr. Parnas won an ACM "Best Paper" Award in 1979, and two "Most Influential Paper" awards from the International Conference on Software Engineering. He is the 1998 winner of ACM SIGSOFT's "Outstanding Research Award".

Dr. Parnas is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He is licensed as a Professional Engineer in the Province of Ontario.

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