Grady Booch

Grady Booch

image of Grady Booch

Grady Booch is a software engineer, and Chief Scientist, Software Engineering in IBM Research. He is best known for developing the Unified Modeling Language with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh.

He earned his bachelor's degree in 1977 from the United States Air Force Academy and a master's degree in electrical engineering in 1979 from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

He is former Chief Scientist of Rational Software (acquired by IBM on February 20, 2003), where he worked until March 18, 2008. Afterwards he became Chief Scientist, Software Engineering in IBM Research, and series editor for Benjamin Cummings.

In 1995 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He was named an IBM Fellow in 2003, soon after his entry into IBM, and assumed his current role on March 18, 2008. He was recognized as an IEEE Fellow in 2010.

Booch is best known for developing the Unified Modeling Language with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh. He also developed the Booch method of software development, which he presents in his book, Object Oriented Analysis and Design. He advises adding more classes to simplify complex code. Booch is also an advocate of design patterns. (For instance, he wrote the foreword to Design Patterns, an early and highly influential book in the field.) In the 1980s, Booch wrote one of the more popular books on programming in Ada.


last updated 3 November 2011 - cgr