Bruce was raised by wolves in the Oregon wilderness. He taught himself to read at age 3 and calculus before age 12. He dropped out of school when he was 14 and traveled around the US for a few years before entering the University of Oregon as a mathematics major. He eventually received his M.S. in exercise physiology from the University of Oregon and his Ph.D. in neurocybernetics from the USD Medical School, where he developed a branch of mathematics called autocorrelative factor analysis for studying information processing in multicellular biological neural systems.
Bruce has worked as a software developer and systems engineer in real-time systems for over 30 years and is a well-known speaker, author, and consultant in the area of real-time embedded systems. He has been on the Advisory Board of the Embedded Systems and UML World conferences where he has taught courses in systems engineering, project estimation and scheduling, project management, object-oriented analysis and design, communications protocols, finite state machines, design patterns, and safety-critical systems design. He develops and teaches courses and consults in real-time systems and software design and project management and has done so for many years. He has done extensive consulting, specializing in real-time safety critical systems developments, especially in the industries of aerospace, defense, medical, and automotive. He has authored articles for many journals and periodicals, especially in the real-time and embedded domain.
From 2007 to 2019, he was is the Chief Evangelist for IBM Internet of Things (IoT). Being a Chief Evangelist is much like being a Chief Scientist, except for the burning bushes and stone tablets. Bruce worked with UML partners on the specification of the UML and SysML standards. He developed the first UML Profile for DoDAF for the Rhapsody(r) modeling tool as well as other profiles such as a Fault Tree Analysis Profile and a Security Analysis Profile. He has been a co-chair of the Object Management Group’s Real-Time Analysis and Design Working Group. He is the author of several other books on systems and software development, including Doing Hard Time: Developing Real-Time Systems with UML, Objects, Frameworks and Patterns (Addison-Wesley, 1999), Real-Time Design Patterns: Robust Scalable Architecture for Real-Time Systems (Addison-Wesley, 2002), Real-Time UML 3rd Edition: Advances in the UML for Real-Time Systems (Addison-Wesley, 2004), Real-Time Agility (Addison-Wesley, 2009), Design Patterns for Embedded Systems in C (Elsevier, 2011), Real-Time UML Workshop for Embedded Systems (Elsevier, 2014), Agile Systems Engineering (Elsevier, 2015), Agile Product Development for Dummies (with Jonathan Chard)(IBM Limited Edition, 2015), The Harmony aMBSE Deskbook (2017 available here for download), Agile Model-Based Systems Engineering Cookbook (January, 2021) and several others, including a short textbook on table tennis.
Bruce enjoys classical music and has played classical guitar professionally. He has competed in several sports, including table tennis, ultramarathon bicycle racing, running, and full-contact Tae Kwon Do, although he currently only fights inanimate objects that don't hit back. He has recently gotten back into racing triathlons and ultramarathon cycling and completed his first Ironman triathlon in 2014. He has raced the National 24Hour Challenge several times, and was awarded the coveted 1000 mile jersey in 2019.