 Dr. Adam Kolawa (1957-2011), Parasoft co-founder and CEO, was deeply determined, persistent, and committed to improving the software development process.
Kolawa was truly a pioneer and a champion of software quality and developer productivity. His legacy, Parasoft Corporation, is a stellar example of what software companies can achieve. In the face of software development outsourcing, changing development methodology trends, and competing computing platforms, Parasoft sustained an extraordinarily productive development organization. Parasoft not only capitalizes on Kolawa's vision of software development management and automated defect prevention, but also captures his proven methods so they can be shared and adopted across the industry.
In 1983, Kolawa came to the United States from Poland to obtain a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the California Institute of Technology. While at Caltech, he worked with Geoffrey Fox and helped design and implement the Intel hypercube parallel computer. In 1987, he founded Parasoft with four friends from Caltech. Initially, the company focused on parallel processing technologies. Kolawa transitioned the company from a parallel processing system producer, to a software development tool producer, to a provider of software solutions and services that help organizations deliver better software faster.
Kolawa recently authored The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know About Information Technology (Wiley, 2009). Previously, Kolawa co-authored Automated Defect Prevention: Best Practices in Software Management (Wiley-IEEE, 2007) and Bulletproofing Web Applications (Wiley, 2001). He has also written or contributed to over a hundred articles in publications such as Forbes, CIO, Computerworld, and the Wall Street Journal.
He has been recognized by eWeek as one of the 100 Most Influential People in IT and by Ernst & Young as the Los Angeles Entrepreneur of the Year (software category).
Kolawa was granted 20 patents for software technologies he invented, including runtime memory error detection technology (Patent 5,842,019 and 5,581,696 - granted in 1998), statically analyzing source code quality using rules (Patent 5,860,011 - granted in 1999), and automated unit test case generation technology (Patent 5,761,408 and 5,784,553 - granted in 1998).
For more information, see the Adam Kolawa Wikipedia page:
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Kolawa).
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