Michael Jackson

	Position:	Visiting Professor
	E-mail:	jacksonma acm.org
	Mail:	School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU United Kingdom

Brief Biography

Michael Jackson wrote his first computer program at school in 1951, but did not start programming professionally until 1961. He developed the JSP program design method, which was selected as the standard for UK Government software development. He led the development of JSD, a method of system specification and design based on entity histories represented as sequential processes.

In 1971 he started Michael Jackson Systems Ltd, devoted to JSP and JSD courses, consultancy and tools until its absorption in a takeover in 1989. JSP and JSD were also supported by member companies of a licensee network in Europe, USA, Japan and elsewhere.

Since 1990 he has worked as an independent consultant and
researcher in software development method, holding visiting
posts at several universities and participating DIRC and in
several other research projects. Recent work has focused on the analysis and structure of software development problems, using an approach based on the idea of problem frames.

From 1989 to 2001 he worked, in cooperation with Dr Pamela Zave, as a part-time researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories (now AT&T Research Laboratories) in New Jersey USA. This work focused on the feature interaction problem, and on principles and techniques for specifying telecommunications systems and services. The chief result of the work is the Distributed Feature Composition (DFC) virtual architecture for specifying telecommunications services, now providing the basis of a new AT&T product.

He has described his work in four books: Principles of Program Design (1974); System Development (1983); Software Requirements & Specifications (1995); and Problem Frames (2001).

Publications

A list of publications by Michael Jackson is available.