About

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the 1970s I took degrees in computer science at Yale and the University of California at Berkeley, and spent a couple of years as a research assistant at the Technical University of Munich.

In the 1980s I worked for a few years in the telecommunications industry in Paris, and then for several more years as a consultant in different areas of software engineering with a number of companies in Germany. I participated in several initiatives of the European Commission during those years, including the experts group on Software Engineering Environments, and the NATO Industrial Advisory Group.  I co-wrote a book on programming languages for robotics and first began to be interested in software reuse.

In the early 1990s I came to Italy to head the European Space Software Engineering Environment project. At that time I began to be involved more deeply in the software reuse community and to participate in the organization of the international conference on reuse. During that time I had done some initial work on the economics of reuse, but in 1994 I began to investigate the economics of IT in earnest after being introduced to Value Based Management by my brothers working at Marakon Associates, an international consulting firm specialized in that area. In 1996 I began publishing on valuation techniques and their relevance for software engineers. During that period, I continued to work in software reuse, co-developing a methodology for domain analysis using extensions of elements from the Unified Modeling Language.

During a correspondence in 1998 with Kent Beck while he was writing his book Extreme Programming Explained, I began thinking about the application of the theory of real options in the discussion of flexibility in XP. Since then, I have been interested in agile methods and in particular the study of their characteristics from an economic point of view.

Recently I have become involved with an initiative in the European Union to enable interoperability of business and commerce registers throughout the Member States.

                                            © 2003 - 2008 John Favaro