The book is the fruit of a project which began in 1993 under Nokia Research Center's Strategic Software Initiative spearheaded by laboratory chief   Pertti Lounamaa. The purpose of the Initiative was to promote object-oriented technology across Nokia. Maher Awad has been the prime mover behind Octopus from start to finish. In December 1993, Awad and teammate Juha Kuusela presented the first draft. Duo became trio when software engineer Jurgen Ziegler joined the team in early 1994.

The Octopus method is based on the popular OMT and Fusion methods, but also embodies common practice found in real-time systems. It applies proven object-oriented techniques, while matching the specific needs of real-time systems, such as concurrency, synchronization, communication, handling of interrupts, hardware interfaces and end-to-end response times.

Since the introduction of the method, Octopus has been applied in many projects at Nokia. Nokia Research Center's Software Technology Laboratory headed by laboratory chief   Heikki Saikkonen is assisting those projects and collecting the feedback. It constantly gains new insights and detects flaws or gaps in the Octopus method, due to the real-life experience made and the complementary research work achieved.

In 1998 the method was updated to use UML notation except for features required by the special constraints of embedded real-time systems. This breakthrough has been called Octopus/UML (see Octopus Supplement Volume 1). As a result, any UML based CASE tool can be applied for the routine work.
 

The Octopus method is constantly improved. The Octopus Supplement Series is the media to announce and distribute the official position of the Software Technology Laboratory on any change or enhancement made compared to the book.