James Noble was the 2016 winner of the Dahl-Nygaard Prize.

Noble is a Fellow of the Institute of IT Professionals of New Zealand and the British Computer Society, and a Member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and Engineering New Zealand Te Ao Rangahau.

He held a James Cook Research Fellowship from the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2015 and 2016.

Noble is the founding Editor-In-Chief of the journal Transactions on Pattern Languages of Programming (published by Springer).

He has contributed to object-oriented and aspect-oriented approaches to software design, design patterns and the analysis of software corpus, software visualisation and visual languages, user interaction and agile development methodologies.