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 an international consulting firm specialized in that area. In 1996 I began publishing on valuation techniques and their relevance for software engineers, culminating in an approach we called Value-Based IT Management (VBIM) in 1998. 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.
From 2005 to 2009 I was involved with an initiative in the European Union to enable interoperability of business and commerce registers throughout the Member States. I have been an expert evaluator for proposals in the EC research programs.
In January 2008 I took on a position as Associate Editor of IEEE Software magazine in the area of software management. From January 2024 am handling the Sounding Board department of the magazine as a member of the Advisory Board.
Since 2009 I have also been working in the area of mission-critical systems, with a particular focus on the ISO 26262 standard for functional safety in automotive electronics. I have worked on a number of industrial projects in automotive functional safety, and have recently begun to work in the area of automotive security. In 2021 I designed one of the first training programs on the new automotive cybersecurity standard ISO/SAE 21434.
Since 2018 I have been working closely with Trust-IT Services to communicate advances in IT, particularly within the European research area.