It is a sad time in the software testing and quality assurance community:
we have lost one of the true icons and original thinkers of the entire field.
Boris's two major works,
Software Testing Techniques
and
System Software Testing and Quality Assurance,
were the technical underpinning of the majority of the ideas and developments in
the software testing and QA field,
starting in the early 1980's and continuing to the present.
The ideas he emphasized in both books and in his consulting and speaking activities included (but were hardly limited to)
structural analysis of software to reveal its properties,
automatic analysis of program behavior,
and systematic application of rigorous methods of software inspection and dynamic testing.
Almost every type of automated program analysis related to testing was foretold in his work.
Boris was an extraordinarily active participant in the testing community.
He attended and spoke frequently at many software testing oriented events,
and at conferences often was seen engaged in intense debate with attendees over
the pros and cons of a wide range of relevant technologies.
His observations and interplay were always direct, very often humorous, never evil-minded, and genuinely respectful.
We first met Boris in ~1989 and he became a regular participant at the Quality Week and Quality Week Europe (QW/QWE) conferences.
After he gave a half-day tutorial at QW/1991 he recommended that we use a Program Committee to shape future QW/QWE technical programs.
We followed his advice, beginning with QW/1992, with Boris as one of the charter members of the QW/QWE Program Committee.
He served on that committee all the way through QW/2002.
His reviews and critiques of proposed papers and presentations were regularly merciless
and always very much on point.
He kept the QW/QWE programs honest and lively!
For him it was always about Quality with a capital Q!
His energy, style, directness, honesty, and dedication will be missed by us all.
-- Edward Miller, Rita Bral
