Berry briefly weaves the twin peaks of (1) his life with interests in computing, programming, programming languages, software engineering, formal methods, electronic publishing, and requirements engineering with (2) the almost concurrent development of the fields of Programming Languages (PLs), Software Engineering (SE), and Requirements Engineering (RE). He then traces the history of RE from (1) its beginnings as a concern for writing good specifications for computer-based systems (CBSs), through (2) a recognition that the tough problems were the joint elicitation and analysis of requirements, through (3) a recognition of the non-technical nature of elicitation and analysis, through (4) a recognition of the necessity to consider a CBS’s interaction with the real world, to (5) what the RE field is now.

Daniel M. Berry got his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University in 1974. He was on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA from 1972 until 1987. He was in the Computer Science Faculty at the Technion, Israel from 1987 until 1999. From 1990 until 1994, he worked for half of each year at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, USA, where he was part of a group that built CMU’s Master of Software Engineering program. During the 1998-1999 academic year, he visited the Computer Systems Group at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. In 1999, Berry moved to what is now the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Between 2008 and 2013, Berry held an Industrial Research Chair in Requirements Engineering sponsored by Scotia Bank and the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). Berry’s current research interests are software engineering in general, and requirements engineering and electronic publishing in the specific.