Wayne P. Stevens was an American software engineer

Software engineer

A software engineer is an engineer who applies the principles of software engineering to the design, development, testing, and evaluation of the software and systems that make computers or anything containing software, such as computer chips, work.- Overview :...

, consultant, author, pioneer, and advocate of the practical application of software methods

Software development methodology

A software development methodology or system development methodology in software engineering is a framework that is used to structure, plan, and control the process of developing an information system.- History :...

 and tools.

Life & Work

Stevens grew up in Missouri

Missouri

Missouri is a US state located in the Midwestern United States, bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. With a 2010 population of 5,988,927, Missouri is the 18th most populous state in the nation and the fifth most populous in the Midwest. It...

, spent two years in India, where he attended the Woodstock School

Woodstock School

Woodstock School is a Christian, international, co-educational, residential school located in Landour, a small hill station contiguous with the town of Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, India....

, and earned his M.S.

Master of Science

A Master of Science is a postgraduate academic master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is typically studied for in the sciences including the social sciences.-Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay:...

 in Electrical Engineering

Electrical engineering

Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...

 from MIT in 1967. He eventually became the chief architect of application development methodology for IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

's consulting group. The annual Stevens Award

Stevens Award

The Stevens Award is a software engineering award given in memory of Wayne Stevens. The international Stevens Award was created to recognize outstanding contributions to the literature or practice of methods for software and systems development...

 Lecture on Software Development Methods is named after him.

He belonged to the IEEE and the ACM

Association for Computing Machinery

The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

 as well as the following honorary societies: Tau Beta Pi

Tau Beta Pi

The Tau Beta Pi Association is the oldest engineering honor society in the United States and the second oldest collegiate honor society in America. It honors engineering students who have shown a history of academic achievement as well as a commitment to personal and professional integrity...

, Sigma Xi

Sigma Xi

Sigma Xi: The Scientific Research Society is a non-profit honor society which was founded in 1886 at Cornell University by a junior faculty member and a handful of graduate students. Members elect others on the basis of their research achievements or potential...

, and Eta Kappa Nu

Eta Kappa Nu

Eta Kappa Nu is the electrical and computer engineering honor society of the IEEE, founded in October 1904 by Maurice L. Carr at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The organization currently has around 200 student chapters and about 3,000,000 members and is headquartered in Chicago,...

.

He wrote a seminal paper on Structured Design

Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method

Structured systems analysis and design method is a systems approach to the analysis and design of information systems. SSADM was produced for the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency , a UK government office concerned with the use of technology in government, from 1980 onwards.- Overview...

, with Larry Constantine

Larry Constantine

Larry LeRoy Constantine is an American software engineer and professor in the Mathematics and Engineering Department at the University of Madeira Portugal, who is considered one of the pioneers of computing...

 and Glenford Myers, and was the author of a number of books and articles on application design methodologies. He also worked with John Paul Morrison

John Paul Morrison

John Paul Morrison is a British-born Canadian computer programmer, and the inventor of flow-based programming . He is the author of the books Flow-Based Programming: A New Approach to Application Development and Flow-Based Programming, 2nd Edition: A New Approach to Application Development...

 to refine and promote the concepts of what is now called Flow-based programming

Flow-based programming

In computer science, flow-based programming 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...

, including descriptions of FBP in several of these references.

Publications

Stevens published several articles and books, including:

• 1982. How Data Flow can Improve Application Development Productivity, IBM System Journal, Vol. 21, No. 2.
• 1981. Using Structured Design: How to make Programs Simple, Changeable, Flexible and Reusable, John Wiley and Sons.
• 1985. Using Data Flow for Application Development. Byte
• 1990. Software Design - Concepts and Methods, Practical Software Engineering Series, Ed. Allen Macro, Prentice Hall.

Articles, a selection

• 1974. "Structured Design". With G. Myers & L. Constantine. In: IBM Systems Journal, 13 (2), 115-139, 1974
• 1988. "Integrating Applications with SAA (Systems Application Architecture)". With L.A. Buchwald & R. W. Davison. In: IBM Systems Journal, Vol 27 No 3, pp 315–324, 1988
• 1991. "Structured Design, Structured Analysis, and Structured Programming". In: American Programmer, Nov. 1991.
• 1994. "Data Flow Analysis and Design". In: Encyclopedia of Software Engineering. John J. Marciniak, Editor-in-Chief, Volume 1, pp 242 – 247, John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 1994.