An expert in Software Engineering from Stellenbosch University, prof. Willem Visser, is only the second computer scientist in South Africa to receive an A-rating from the National Research Foundation.

A-ratings are aimed at researchers who are unequivocally acknowledged by their peers as leading international scholars in their respective fields for the high quality and impact of recent research outputs.

Prof. Willem Visser was honoured for his work in the testing and analysis of computer software. He is currently the Programme co-chair for the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), the largest academic conference in the field. He is also an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, one of the most prestigious journals in this field. He also serves on the council of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technology.

While working at the NASA Ames Research Center in the United States, he was instrumental in the development of Java Path Finder (JPF), a model checker for the programming language Java. In 2012, he was elected to the Executive Committee of the ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering and helped draft the 2014 Software Engineering Curriculum Guidelines.

In February 2015, prof. Andries Engelbrecht from the University of Pretoria was the first computer scientist in South Africa to receive an A-rating.