Peter Chen honoured with the Stevens Award for advancing software development methods
Introduction
Recently the following announcement was sent worldwide:
Peter Chen to receive the 2001 Stevens Award
Stuttgart, Germany––Peter Chen has been named the seventh recipient of the International Stevens Award for advancing software development methods. The award will be presented on Thursday, November 8, 2001, at the 2001 International Conference on Software Maintenance in Florence, Italy.
And so it happened. During a well-attended session of this International Conference on Software Maintenance, Professor Peter Chen was honoured with the prestigious Stevens Award. The award was offered to him by Dr. Elliot Chikofsky, Executive Secretary of the Executive Board of IWCASE, the international association of users, researchers and developers of software tools, methods and technology, who also gave a speech. Paul Layzell brought into memory Wayne Stevens, after whom the award was named. In his speech Elliot gave an account of the predecessors who obtained the award in earlier years, and then explained why the Stevens Award selection committee had chosen Peter Chen. He cited other persons, who had given their opinion on the candidate for this year's award and he let some others say a few remarks.
The Editor for Europe of DKE was also invited for the celebration and found it appropriate to publish a report of this meeting with some fitting pictures in this journal whose Editor-in-Chief has been honoured so rightly.
Section snippets
The laudatio by Elliot Chikofsky
Dr. Chikofsky said, “Software tools and software environment technology were very prominent in the eighties and nineties in the CASE field. One of the outgrowths of that was something called the Stevens Award, where we began to recognize people in the field who were very instrumental in the development and proselytizing the religion of software development methods to introduce, make practical and make accepted development methods; out of that came the recognition. We are here today for the
Who was Wayne Stevens?
Paul Layzel: “I had the privilege to know Wayne Stevens and his family. Wayne was a very respected consultant in practical applications of software development tools. He was a pioneer in using the software development tools himself and writing about it, as he did in his 1974 IBM System's Journal article `Structured design'. This was the first publication on this topic and has been widely reprinted. Wayne Stevens was the author of a number of books, including `Software Design Concepts and
Previous recipients of the Stevens Award
Elliot showed why the award is so prestigious––look at the status of the previous recipients:
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Tony Wasserman, the first recipient in 1995 of the Stevens Award, was founder and Chairman of Interactive Development Environments (IDE); we remember him also from the original IEEE tutorials on software development practice that were published and the “Software through Pictures” toolset.
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David Harel, who received the award in 1996 is professor at the Weizmann Institute in Israel and is founder of
Why select Peter Chen?
Elliot went on: “Peter Chen, in many circles in software is a household word, but in other fields people say: Who is he? Many people recognize the work that has been done, but don't associate the names of the persons who did the fundamental advertisement for making it successful. Peter's contribution is in the foundation of the Entity-Relationship Modelling (abbreviated to ER), so he is very well known in the data modelling community. Somebody, from the data modelling community, who is here
Discussion of Chen's work
Dr. Chikofsky now displayed several people's opinion about the candidacy of Peter Chen for the award. Some were virtual, others were real: one of the other Stevens Award recipients, Tom DeMarco, wrote, “As I look back over my thirty five years in the field I am struck by how much a very few key ideas have affected us all. Peter Chen's development of the ER analysis was one of those. It is impossible to imagine today a database, a data repository, a data warehouse or even a complex file
Peter Chen's response
(In a reaction to people making a picture), “Instead of taking a picture of me in the front, it would be more interesting to take a photo of my back. It was not easy to have been involved in a religious war between different data models twenty-five years ago. Because as a pioneer you get arrows in your back. Usually you can lick your own wounds, but if the arrows are in your back, you cannot lick them yourself; your wife has to do that and she did. She is sitting in a corner of this room.
To the