Software Process Improvement Laboratory

Alastair Walker is the founder and chief executive officer of the Software Process Improvement Laboratory. He holds the degrees of B Sc (Engineering) (1969), M Sc (Engineering) (1972), and Doctor of Philosophy (1979).  He lectured for 30 years in the School of Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.  In 2001 he established the Software Process Improvement Laboratory (SPI-LAB) in order to focus on promoting software process improvement fulltime in local industry.

He is a Fellow of the South African Institute of Electrical Engineers.

He is a member of the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) Information Technology Committee (TC 71), Chair of SABS National Committee for Software and Systems Engineering Standards (SC 71C), member of the SABS National Committee for Quality Management (TC 176), and member of the SABS National Committee for Conformity Assessment (TC 180).
He is the South African representative on the international ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7 Software Engineering Standards Committee Advisory Board since 1994.
He has been a member since 1993 of the international team of experts tasked with the development of the standard for software process assessment and capability determination (ISO/IEC 15504).
He is co-editor for ISO/IEC 20000-4 (Information technology — Service management — Part 4: Process Reference Model).
He is primary editor for the development of ISO/IEC 15504-8 (Information technology — Process assessment — Part 8: An exemplar process assessment model for IT service management).
In May 2010 he was appointed as the Secretariat to ISO/IEC JTC1 SC7 WG 25 (IT Service Management).
He has published numerous technical papers and articles in international journals, and is a regular keynote speaker at local and international conferences dealing with software engineering/ quality management topics.