Grady Booch is an American software engineer best known for his work on object-oriented design and modeling. According to his IEEE Computer Society profile, he is credited with originating the term and the practice of object-oriented design, and is recognized for advancing the fields of software engineering and software architecture.
In the early 1990s Booch developed the Booch method, a notation and process for object-oriented analysis and design. When several competing object-oriented methods existed side by side, he worked with James Rumbaugh and Ivar Jacobson at Rational Software to merge their approaches into a single notation. That effort produced the Unified Modeling Language, which Booch co-authored and which absorbed elements of his earlier method.
Booch served as Chief Scientist at Rational Software and continued in research roles at IBM after IBM acquired Rational. His IEEE profile lists him as Chief Scientist for Software Engineering at IBM Research and notes his fellowships in IBM, the ACM, and the IEEE. He was a founding member of both the Agile Alliance and the Hillside Group.
His honors include the 2016 Computer Pioneer Award, given for pioneering work in object modeling that led to the creation of UML. Beyond his technical work, Booch has been a trustee of the Computer History Museum and has written and spoken widely on the history and human dimensions of computing.