Victor R. Basili

Victor R. Basili is a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, College Park (since 1970), where he served as chairman from 1982 to 1988. He founded the Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering — Maryland, where he served as executive director from 1998–2004. He was one of the founders and principals in the Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) at NASA/GSFC (1976–2001).

He has a BS from Fordham College and an MS from Syracuse University, both in mathematics. He has a PhD 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 an Honorary PhD in natural sciences from the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany (2005).

He has been working on measuring, evaluating, and improving the software development process and product for more than 30 years. Methods for improving software quality include the Goal Question Metric Approach (GQM), a method for defining and interpreting measurement data; the Quality Improvement paradigm (QIP), an evolutionary engineering approach that uses measurement and feedback loops to evolve processes based on their effects in practice; and the Experience Factory organization (EF), a learning organization for the software industry. He has worked on the development of experience bases for a variety of applications, including the development of HEC codes.

Methods for improving software development include the Iterative Enhancement Life Cycle Model, an incremental development approach that builds the next increment based upon analysis of the previous increment, and the development of scenario-based reading techniques for evaluating various software artifacts including Perspective Based Reading (PBR) for reading requirements documents. Methods for cost estimation include the meta-model for resource estimation and optimized set reduction (OSR) for building empirical models of cost and schedule. He developed, tailored, evaluated, and evolved these techniques for several organizations. He has taught courses on this material both at the university and for specific organizations. He has worked with many organizations, including AT&T, Boeing, Daimler-Chrysler, Ericsson, FAA, GE, GTE, IBM, Lucent, MCC, and Motorola and has been a grant recipient from NSF, NASA, AFOSR, ONR, AFOSR, AFRL, DARPA, IBM, Burroughs, Hughes, VITRO, NEC, Finseil, Amdahl, Coopers and Lybrand, Toho Gas, Ricoh, Mutsuhito Panasonic, Sogei, Daimler Benz, Bellcore, and Fujitsu.

He is a recipient of a 1989 NASA Group Achievement Award, a 1990 NASA/GSFC Productivity Improvement and Quality Enhancement Award, the 1997 Award for Outstanding Achievement in Mathematics and Computer Science by the Washington Academy of Sciences, the 2000 Outstanding Research Award from ACM SIGSOFT, and the 2003 Harlan Mills Award for the IEEE Computer Society. In 2005, there was a symposium held in his honor: Foundations of Empirical Software Engineering: Legacy of Victor R. Basili at the 27th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2005), St. Louis, MO, consisting of speeches by colleagues. A book of selected papers by Professor Basili was published by Springer in May 2005.  In 2007, he was awarded the Fraunhofer Medal.

Basili has authored more than 250 journal and refereed conference papers, given more than 50 keynote addresses, served as editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and served as program chair and general chair of the 6th and 15th International Conference on Software Engineering, respectively.  He was an editor of the Journal of Systems and Software.  He is a founding co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Empirical Software Engineering, published by Springer. He is an IEEE and ACM Fellow.