Q-Labs founder sadly passed away

Geir Fagerhus, founder of the pioneering SW process & quality consultancy company Q-Labs (from where Addalot has its heritage), has sadly passed away after illness. Our thoughts and sincere condolences lay with his family.

Geir was an entrepreneur out at the fingertips with the passion of seeing and realizing business opportunities. In 1989, after launching Q-Labs in Lund in southern Sweden he soon aimed for Q-Labs to go globally – and not many years later Q-Labs had offices in Germany and in the US.

Geir also had high interest to link industry with academia and “bridging the gap” was one of his slogans. As part of this strategy Q-Labs establieshed offices close to the strong software engineering universities and organizations such as Fraunhofer Institute in Kaiserslautern and the Universities of Lund and Maryland.

He also established cooperations with with some of the world’s at the time most prominent researchers (Harlan Mills, Victor Basili, Dieter Rombach, Bill Curtis and Claes Wohlin) and settled an “advisory board” for Q-Labs, where many of them had a seat. Furthermore, Geir managed for Q-Labs to get key roles in European Research Projects, e.g. REBOOT and PERFECT.

Geir was always on the outlook for new technology and opportunities, establishing co-operation with the founders of the technologies. This led Q-Labs to to introduce models such as Cleanroom Software Engineering and CMM to Ericsson and other customers.

After establishing a handful of offices globally, Geir wanted to keep the company together with his so called “One company approach”.  Many of us holds treasured memories of meetings with Geir joining in from different parts of the world…

Geir at the 25 years – ”open house” event, with new and old Q-Labs employees celebrated at Ideon Science Park in, Lund– where it all started.

After Q-Labs Geir engaged himself in:

• Establishing SEI (Software Engineering Institute) Europe, seated in Germany
• Establishing MARSEC a multimodal transport optimization company with focus on the maritime mode of transport employing the Industrial Internet of Things and Big Data Analytics technologies.

Geir enthusiasm was also present outside work. He became a passionate marathon runner and the last years he became an Eco-farmer at Malta, among other things producing olive oil.

Many people in the software engineering world and the software industry as such have many things to thank Geir for. Not only because of challenging work opportunities, advancements of software business but also for him showing what can be achieved through a what a can-do mentality.

Geir could personify a Whynotters (and drag the Yesbutters with him).

So please join us in honoring Geir – best by really conquer your dreams, as well in work as in life in general