VALE Associate Professor David Carrington
7 January 2011



As anyone who served on committees with him will attest, David Carrington was a truly nice guy. He never had a bad word to say about anyone, and he always managed to find a positive way of looking at something. He was extremely devoted to his teaching, his family and to his friends, even when very ill.

David joined the Department of Computer Science (as it was then) in 1989 from UNSW. From the sale of his house in the northern Sydney suburbs he was able to swap a 60-minute commute to UNSW for a 5 min walk from Boomerang Rd, St Lucia, with more rooms, a swimming pool and change left over! He was originally from New Zealand, but we hardly ever held that against him.

He had a great passion for teaching, which rubbed off on his students: many ex-ITEE students have said he was their favourite lecturer. He was instrumental in establishing key initiatives in software engineering at UQ. For example, he set up and managed the Software Engineering major in the BE, which was one of the first Software Engineering programs accredited by Engineers Australia. To support the BE(Software Engineering), he established an Industry Advisory Board (following this example, similar IABs were set up for other Engineering majors in our School), and the Software Engineering Laboratory Supervisors (SELS) scheme to provide generic teaching assistance to students in first- and second-year programming courses. His achievements were recognised by an EPSA Faculty Teaching Award in 2007 and a UQ Excellence in Teaching Award in 2008.

But David's influence went well beyond UQ. He was the Knowledge Area Specialist for the Methods and Tools section for the Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) project, which is sponsored by the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society. He was an active member of the Australian Software Engineering academic community, was awarded several teaching grants, had numerous teaching publications, and was involved in the organisation of education-related conferences (e.g. he was the General Chair of the Australian Software Engineering Conference in 2005 and 2009, and the General Chair of the Third Australasian Conference on Computer Science Education).

David's research focused on Software Engineering and Formal Methods. On many occasions he was a Visiting Fellow at the prestigious Software Engineering Institute at CMU in Pittsburgh, and became an authorised Personal Software Process (PSP) instructor and a Team Software Process (TSP) coach, which is no small achievement. Much of the valuable experience he gained fed back into his teaching and research at UQ. He was also awarded a Boeing Welliver Fellowship to spend 2 months with Boeing in the US in 2001. He was made a Fellow of Engineers Australia in 2003.

David Carrington was a great colleague, mentor and teacher; he was well-respected by all staff (academic and general) and students. After a long battle with cancer he passed away peacefully on 7 January 2011 with his family around him. He is survived by his wife Heather Jensen, son Paul and daughters Helen and Jennifer.