Ivar Jacobson
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Ivar Hjalmar Jacobson (born in Ystad, Sweden, on September 2, 1939) is a Swedish computer scientist.
He got his Master of Electrical Engineering at Chalmers Institute of Technology in Göteborg in 1962 and a Ph.D. at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1985 on a thesis on Language Constructs for Large Real Time Systems.
In 1967 he proposed the use of software components in the development of the new generation of software controlled telephone switches Ericsson was developing. In doing this he invented sequence diagrams, and developed collaboration diagrams. He also applied state transition diagrams to describe the message flow between the components.
He thought that there needed to be blueprints for software development. He was one of the original developers of SDL (Specification and Description Language). In 1967, SDL became a standard in the telecoms industry.
At Ericsson he also invented use cases as a way to specify functional software requirements.
In April 1987 he quit Ericsson and started Objective Systems. A majority stake of the company was acquired by Ericsson in 1991, and the company was renamed to Objectory AB. Ivar developed the software process OOSE at Objectory circa 1992.
In October 1995 Ericsson divested Objectory to Rational Software [1] and Ivar started working with Grady Booch and James Rumbaugh to first create the UML, and later develop the Rational Unified Process. Rational was bought by IBM in 2003 and Ivar decided to quit, but he stayed on until May 2004 as an executive technical consultant.
In November 2005, Jacobson announced he was working with Microsoft to produce an Essential Unified Process for Visual Studio Team System, that he describes as a "super light and agile" RUP.
