David Parnas

He is a Canadian who worked in the USA, Germany, Canada, Ireland. See Wikipedia

Very outspoken person with strong opinions (which are right most of the time, I think). Here are some interesting papers:

• In 1972, he talks about information hiding - one of the principles of object-orientation
• Why and how to fake a rational software engineering process
• Much of his research was aimed at creating reliable software (bug free - if possible). This is difficult, and his attack of the USA Star War got him into the international press - here an example . He argues that the required software would be so complex that it would be impossible to get an implementation with the required reliability (there would be too many bugs left in the software).