ISPMA Grieves the Passing of Our Fellow Prof. Dr. Guenther Ruhe
ISPMA is profoundly saddened by the passing of Prof. Dr. Guenther Ruhe, a remarkable ISPMA Fellow, and an outstanding Scholar. His impact as a pioneering researcher, an inspiring teacher, and a kind-hearted human being will forever be remembered. In tribute to Guenther, we have posthumously inducted him into the ISPMA Hall of Fame.
Guenther Ruhe was born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1952 where he also started his academic career by studying mathematics. He got his Ph.D. in Operations Research in 1981 and stayed in academia. He got his Doctor of Habilitation in Operations Research in Leipzig in 1988, and after the German reunification, another Doctor of Habilitation in Informatics in Kaiserslautern, Germany, in 2001.
At that time, he was the Deputy Director at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering Fh IESE, Germany. Then he decided to move to Canada, where he became the Industrial Research Chair in Software Engineering at the University of Calgary, a position he was holding till his end. He also ran his own startup Expert Decisions Inc.
Guenther was a well-known member of the international academic community, most respected in particular for his research in the areas of product release planning, software engineering and requirements management. He published a lot of influential books and research papers. He won various awards such as the Alberta iCORE (Informatics Center of Research Excellence) Award, the IBM Research Award, and the Microsoft Research Software Engineering Innovation Award. Since 2016, he served as Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Journal of Information and Software Technology, published by Elsevier.
As an ISPMA Fellow, he contributed a lot to the ISPMA Body of Knowledge through his research and as a member of multiple working groups. He also was a frequent speaker and contributor to ISPMA’s SPM Summits, both in Europe and in India. In 2022, he gave a keynote at the SPM Summit Europe.
We have lost an amazing researcher and teacher, and a wonderful human being. Our deepest condolences are with his wife and family.
