Peter Hruschka is a principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild, working from his hometown Aachen, Germany. As a trainer and consultant he concentrates on business analysis, requirements engineering, and system and software architectures – preferably in the embedded world. He loves to be involved in developing products that combine software with hardware, electrical and mechanical components – thus creating interesting systems in domains like medical systems, automotive, telecommunication, manufacturing and others.

Peter is the co-founder of arc42, a portal for practical and pragmatic hints for software architecture documentation and development and the home of the arc42-architecture documentation template. He also founded req42, the home of pragmatic requirements engineering in an agile environment. He is a founding member of IREB (International Requirements Engineering Board) and iSAQB (International Software Architecture Qualification Board) and participated in creating curricula and certification schemes to foster these professions.

He is the (co-)author of many books and papers on software engineering. The second edition of “Business Analysis und Requirements Engineering”(in German, Carl-Hanser-Verlag) was published in 2019. Together with the IREB working group“RE@Agile”he created the handbook for this advanced level module about requirements engineering in an agile environment (free download). Among the many books about software architecture is “Communicating Software Architectures – lean, effective and painless documentation”and “Knigge für Software Architekten”(in German, Carl-Hanser-Verlag), both coauthored with Gernot Starke. With his partner from the Guild he wrote “Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior”available in many languages.

Peter received his masters and PhD in computer science from the Technical University of Vienna. He started his career at GEI, a leading German System and Software House in 1976. After complaining about the unstructured working style of his colleagues he became head of the training department, developing and teaching seminars on analysis and design methods. From these seminars came the idea to automate some of the methods. Peter developed one of the first modeling tools. This product determined the next 15 years of his career. After successfully establishing the product in many European companies, Peter spent a year in California introducing modeling methods and tools to many US companies. During this time he was in constant contact with the leading people in software methods. This resulted in PROMOD being the first product to implement the Hatley/Pirbhai real-time method. Later on it supported all the UML diagrams, as well as code generation and reverse engineering for multiple programming languages.

When he is not working, he is usually found with his wife in some of the most scenic parts of world, trying to hit little white balls into holes that are too far away and far too small.