The Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) have awarded Mary Shaw and Dave Garlan the Outstanding Research Award 2011. Both computer scientists have pioneered the work on Software Architecture at the Software Engineering Institute of the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
IT experts might think that Software Architecture is a mature discipline that exists since the dawn of computer programming. Actually, the software engineering community started to focus their research on software architecture more intensively as late as in the 1990s, although as the fundamental principles have been investigated in the 1980s. Especially, the pattern movement and their seminal books like GoF (Gang of Four) and POSA (Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture) lead to the broad awareness of Software Architecture among many software developers and IT managers. However, many do not know that professors like Shaw and Garlan have initiated this revolution.
As William Scherlis, director of the Institute of Software Research at the CMU mentions:
The term 'software architecture' was first used in the late 1960s, but its significance didn't become clear until almost 20 years later, when David and Mary asserted that architecture could be addressed using systematic approaches ... Their work and that of their colleagues here at Carnegie Mellon has since led to engineering methods for architectural modeling, analysis and identification of architecture-level patterns, the use of which has now become standard in the engineering of larger scale software systems.
In 1996 Shaw and Garlan have published their classical book on Software Architecture called Software Engineering: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline in which they introduced the fundamental of architecture design as well as fundamental architectural styles.
Both scientists received their awards during the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2011) in Hawaii.