Home / About NAG / People of NAG / Leon Osterweil

Leon Osterweil, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Leon J. Osterweil is currently Dean of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he is also a professor in the Department of Computer Science, co-director of the Laboratory for Advanced Software Engineering Research (LASER), and founding co-director of the Electronic Enterprise Institute. He has consulted for such organizations as IBM, Bell Laboratories, SAIC, MCC, and TRW, and SEI's Process Program Advisory Board.

Professor Osterweil is a member of both the NAG Ltd Technical Policy Committee and the NAG Inc. Advisory Panel and has been associated with NAG since its formation.

“ I have been pleased to have been associated with NAG and its products for over three decades. I have watched NAG grow from a small collaboration into an internationally prominent company that is a paradigm of high quality software development and support. Watching this growth has been most gratifying. More fundamentally, however, what has attracted me in the past, and continues to attract my support and involvement is NAG's single-minded devotion to quality in software.

Like many, I am increasingly concerned and distressed by the low quality of commercial software, and worried that, as software systems continue to proliferate in pivotal societal roles, that low quality increasingly undermines our society, threatening our health, welfare, and safety. Against the growing tide of poor quality software, NAG has continued to stand, demonstrating what software quality means, and how it can be achieved. I continue to hope that my own thoughts, efforts, and research can be of use to NAG in its continuing attempts to provide leadership in the area of software quality. I can only hope that NAG and its efforts will be emulated increasingly widely. I certainly intend to continue to work with NAG towards those ends.”