Research
 
I work in the area of Software Engineering. Within this broad domain, my goal is to understand how software is produced and maintained in real life settings. Understanding is the prerequisite to improve industrial software production.

Software production involves at least four aspects: processes, people and organization, tools, technology.
In the past years, my research has focused on:

• Technology and Tools:
• Object Oriented Analysis, Design and Programming [Joop 1991]
• Modular Petri Nets for Specifying and Simulating CIM systems [Joop 1991, Euromicro 1989, Ist 1989]
• Product Lines [Ase 2000]
• Framework based development [Metrics 1999, Tse 2000-b]
• Development of software and services for wireless devices [Springer2006]
• Processes and People:
• Reuse [Tse 2000-a, Tse2000-b, Springer 2001, Ieeesw 2000-a]
• COTS based development [Icse2000, Jss 2002a, Jss 2002b, Ieeesw-04]
• Processes and measures for individuals and small teams: PSP, PIPSI [Ieeesw 2000-b, Eurospi 2000, Ieeesw-05]
• Evaluation and selection of Tools [Iee 1997, tse2000-a]

Since 1995 I have applied empirical methods, such as case studies, experiments, surveys, to prove or disprove the effectiveness of a technique, tool or method starting from observation of facts instead of claims. Besides being a key turning point in my career, it has allowed me to develop a know how in the design of experiments, surveys and case studies, in software process and product metrics, in the instrumentation of the software process to collect both qualitative and quantitative evidence [Jss 1999]. In physics, part of the research community proposes theories, part tries to prove or disprove them. Although this distinction is not yet clear in software engineering, I like to consider myself, with little modesty, the equivalent of an experimental physicist.

The application domains I have mostly worked on are industrial automation, telecommunications, satellite management and control.

Most of this research has been carried out within projects funded by the European Commission. As a result I have gained experience in proposing, evaluating and managing research projects in the framework of ESPRIT and IST.

Professional activities

• IEEE Software, Associate editor in chief (2008 - current)
  
• Empirical Software Engineering Journal, Associate editor  (2008 - current)
  
• CoDirector, Software Engineering Laboratory (1998 to 2000)
• Reviewer, Esprit, NSF  and IST.
• Reviewer, IEEE TSE, IEEE Computer, IEEE Software, JSS, SPE, ESE, JSME, IST.
• Tutorial presenter, ICSE99, ICSM99, ERW98, SP96, SP95.
• Visiting research assistant, University of Maryland, Department of Computer Science,  Experimental Software Engineering Group.  (1998 to 2000)