Michael A. Jackson (computer scientist)

Michael Anthony Jackson (born February 16, 1936) is a British computer scientist and independent computing consultant, and a visiting research professor at the Open University. He developed Jackson Structured Programming in the 1970s, described in his 1975 book Principles of Program Design, a method that analyzes the data structures of a program's input and output files and derives the program's control structure from them using the three basic structures of sequence, iteration and selection; the technique was originally aimed at making COBOL batch file processing programs easier to modify and maintain, but applies to any language with structured control constructs. He later developed the related Jackson System Development method for broader software system design.