Professor Victor R. Basili

Born in Brooklyn, New York, he is an Emeritus Professor at the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, both at University of Maryland in College Park. He is well known for his works on measuring, evaluating, and improving the Software development process, especially his papers on the Goal / Question / Metric Approach, the Quality Improvement Paradigm, and the Experience Factory. Many of these ideas developed through his affiliation with the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL), which he helped to create and was one of its directors from 1976 through 2002. He received his B.S. degree from Fordham College and his M.S. degree from Syracuse University; both in Mathematics. He holds a PH.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a recipient of the Laurea Honoris Causa in Informatic Engineering from the University of Sannio in Italy (2004) and in 2005 he received an Honorary Ph.D. in Natural Sciences from the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany. He is a Fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). From 1982 through 1988 he was Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering in College Park, Maryland; and from 1997 to 2004 served as its Executive Director. He was the recipient of the 2003 Harlan D. Mills Award, "For significant contributions to programming languages, program reading and writing, and empirical methods". Also, on May 16, 2005, the Worldwide Software Engineering Community honored him for his achievements in empirical software engineering, citing his research in the 1970s and early 1980s on software measurement and the Goal Question Metric (GQM) model; research in the 1980s and 1990s on these measurement ideas' maturation into a software engineering model of empirical studies, including the development of the Quality Improvement Paradigm (QIP); and the influence of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Software Engineering Laboratory; as well as research since 1990 in the Experience Factory as a model for creating learning organizations for continuous software process improvement. He is the author or co-author of numerous publications including, ?Lessons learned from 25 years of process improvement: The rise and fall of the NASA Software Engineering Laboratory?, with F. McGarry, R. Pajerski and M. Zelkowitz, IEEE Computer Society and ACM International Conf. on Soft. Eng., Orlando FL, May 2002, 69-79.