Talk:Tony Wasserman

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Requested changes and additions to my Wikipedia bio, including citations to validate the material. This document is in two parts - the first is a set of proposed changes to the existing Wikipedia entry and the second is some proposed new material that fills in some of the missing pieces. If requested, I can also provide an updated photo, and some information about my birth and early life. Thanks to everyone who works on making these revisions and updates - I know that it involves a fair amount of work, and I am grateful for your help in making this biographical entry as accurate as possible. Please feel free to contact me at tony.wasserman@gmail.com with any questions or requests for clarification.

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Revise Title: Anthony I. (Tony) Wasserman

Requested revisions for the current four paragraphs of the entry (31 January 2026). I would also like to contribute information about "Early Life" but am not sure how to do that in the absence of documentation. Please advise.

Change Wikipedia entry from "Tony Wasserman" to "Anthony I. (Tony) Wasserman"

Paragraph 1 - Revise existing text: Suggested revision: "Anthony I. 'Tony' Wasserman (born March 1, 1945) is an American computer scientist. He was the founder and CEO of Interactive Development Environments, Inc. (IDE), and was later a Professor of the Practice in Software Management at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley from 2005 to 2023. He is currently Principal Consultant at Software Methods and Tools, where he advises tech founders and their startups, and consults on topics related to evaluation, adoption, and use of open source software.Twasserman (talk) 20:45, 14 May 2025 (UTC)" He was a Board Member of the Open Source Initiative from 2010-16 (1)

[2] https://skydeck.berkeley.edu/advisors/ [24] https://web.archive.org/web/20190520101609/https://www.cmu.edu/iii/innovators/faculty-staff/wasserman.html

Paragraph 2 - Revise existing text: Original: As a special faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, Wasserman teaches classes in cloud computing, open source software, and software product definition. He is a frequent speaker at Open Source conferences around the world including the Open World Forum.[3] He was the general chair of the tenth international conference on Open Source systems, OSS2014, in Costa Rica.[4] Suggested revision: "As a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University's Silicon Valley campus, Wasserman led development of the Software Management MS curriculum, and taught classes in software product definition, software product strategy, and open source software. [21]

[21] https://web.archive.org/web/20071011031034/http://west.cmu.edu/who_we_are/faculty_staff/

Paragraph 3 - Revise existing text: Original text: "After working as a professor at the University of California, San Francisco and as a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, Wasserman founded and was CEO of Interactive Development Environments, a computer-aided software engineering company that became a predecessor of Atego, from 1983 to 1993. He then became vice president of Bluestone Software before its acquisition by Hewlett Packard.[2]" Suggested revision: "Wasserman served as a Professor of Medical Information Science at the University of California, San Francisco from 1971-1988 and as a Lecturer in the Computer Science Division at the University of California, Berkeley. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the Vrije Universiteit (Amsterdam)in 1978 (26), the Université de Genève in 1983, and the National University of Singapore in 2014 (25). While at UCSF, he founded and was CEO of Interactive Development Environments (IDE), a computer-aided software engineering company that was one of the first 100 dotcoms (no. 78), from 1983-1993 (7), and as Chair from 1983-1996. He then became vice president of Bluestone Software before its acquisition by Hewlett Packard, leading the development of early mobile applications.[2]"

Paragraph 4 - Revise existing text: Original text: In 1996 he was elected as a fellow of the IEEE "for contributions to software engineering, including the development of computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools".[5] In the same year he also became a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for technical and professional contributions to the field of software engineering".[6]" Suggested revision: In 2025, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Technical Committee on Software Engineering of the IEEE Computer Society [20]. In 1996 he was elected as a fellow of the IEEE "for contributions to software engineering, including the development of computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools".[6] In the same year he also was selected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for technical and professional contributions to the field of software engineering".[7] He was chosen as an IFIP Fellow in 2020 (18), a Fellow of the International Software Product Management Association (ISPMA) in 2022 (19), and a Fellow of the EAI in 2019 [22].

[20] https://tc.computer.org/tcse/ [6] https://www.ieee.org/membership/fellows/fellows-directory.html [7] https://awards.acm.org/award_winners/wasserman_1068543.cfm [19] https://ispma.org/fellows/ [22] https://eai.eu/list-of-fellows/ [25] https://conf.researchr.org/profile/anthonywasserman [26] https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/history/Historical_talk.pdf

Academic Research (Revise Existing TEXT)

ORIGINAL: Wasserman's academic research focused on two projects: the User Software Engineering (USE) project, begun at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1975[9] and the Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI), begun at Carnegie Mellon University, Silicon Valley, in 2005. The focus of the User Software Engineering project was "user-centered design, combined with techniques for software engineering, in order to produce systems that are reliable, easy to use, and well adapted to user needs."[10][11] The focus of the COSI work is evaluation and adoption of open source software by businesses and organizations, originally the Business Readiness Rating,[12] now OSSpal.[13] Wasserman earned his A.B. degree at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966 with a double major in Mathematics and Physics, and earned his Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1970.[14]

Suggested revision Wasserman's academic research focused on two projects: the User Software Engineering (USE) project, begun at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1975[9] and the Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI), begun at Carnegie Mellon West (later renamed as Carnegie Mellon University - Silicon Valley), in 2005. [23] The focus of the User Software Engineering project was "user-centered design, combined with techniques for software engineering, in order to produce systems that are reliable, easy to use, and well adapted to user needs."[10][11] The focus of the COSI work was evaluation and adoption of open source software by businesses and organizations, originally the Business Readiness Rating,[12] and later revised as OSSpal.[13]

Professional activities Tony was co-founder of ACM's Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT), and its first elected Chair (1977) [27], serving as Chair until 1981, and on the SIGSOFT Executive Committee until 1993. [28] He was a member of the IFIP Working Group on Open Source Systems from 2006 onward [29], and served as its Chair from 2015-2022. [30]

Wasserman earned his A.B. degree at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966 with a double major in Mathematics and Physics, and earned his Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1970. His doctoral dissertation was titled "Achievement of Skill and Generality in an Artificial Intelligence Program" [14]. He has published more than 100 research papers and served as an editor for 13 books. [31] He was Editor-in-Chief of ACM Computing Surveys from 1983-86 [32].

[23] https://web.archive.org/web/20051123233641/http://cosi.west.cmu.edu/ [27] https://dl.acm.org/toc/sigsoft/1976/1/2 [28] https://dl.acm.org/toc/sigsoft/1993/18/1 [29] https://web.archive.org/web/20090415014810/http://ifipwg213.org/ [30] https://web.archive.org/web/20220829200558/http://ifipwg213.org/ [31] https://dblp.org/search?q=anthony%20wasserman [32] https://dl.acm.org/toc/csur/1983/15/1

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Wasserman's academic research focused on two projects: the User Software Engineering (USE) project, begun at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1975 (10) and the Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI), begun at Carnegie Mellon University, Silicon Valley, in 2005. The focus of the User Software Engineering project was "user-centered design, combined with techniques for software engineering, in order to produce systems that are reliable, easy to use, and well adapted to user needs." (12,16) The focus of the COSI work is evaluation and adoption of open source software by businesses and organizations, originally the Business Readiness Rating (11), now OSSpal (15).

He received the 2012 Distinguished Educator Award from the IEEE's Technical Council on Software Engineering (1) and the 2013 Influential Educator Award from the ACM's Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (2).

Wasserman has been active in the professional software engineering and open source communities. He was a co-founder of ACM's Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (1977) and its first elected chair (8). Tony is a member (2006-present) and was Chair (2015-2022) of IFIP Working Group 2.13 (Open Source).(13) He served as General Chair of the Int'l. Conf. on Open Source Systems in 2009 (3) and 2014 (4), and was Program Co-Chair of the 11th Int'l. Conf. on Open Source Systems in 2015 (9). Tony is a member (1977-present) of IFIP Working Group 8.1 (Design and Evaluation of Information Systems) (14). He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Open Source Initiative (2010-2016).(17)

Wasserman earned his A.B. degree at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966 with a double major in Mathematics and Physics, and earned his Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1970. (5)

(1) http://www.cs-tcse.org/awards (2) http://www.sigsoft.org/awards/educator.htm (3) http://oss2009.org/index.php?id=cfp.htm (4) http://oss2014.case.unibz.it/en/organization.html (5) http://www.genealogy.ams.org/id.php?id=69929 (7) https://www.pcworld.com/article/532545/oldest_domains.html (8) http://historywiki.acm.org/sigs/SIGSOFT and http://portalparts.acm.org/110000/101328/fm/frontmatter.pdf (9) http://www.oss2015.org/organizing-committee/ (10) Wasserman, Anthony Ira. "Some Principles of User Software Engineering for Information Systems." IEEE COMPCON Spring 75 Conference Digest. 1975. (11) Wasserman, Anthony I., Murugan Pal, and Christopher Chan. "The Business Readiness Rating: a framework for evaluating open source." EFOSS-Evaluation Framework for Open Source Software (2006). (12) Wasserman, A.I., “User Software Engineering and the Design of Interactive Systems,” Proc. 5th Int’l. Conf. on Software Engineering, San Diego, 1981, pp. 387-393. (13) http://ifipwg213.org (14) https://research.idi.ntnu.no/ifip-wg81/english/members (15) A.I. Wasserman, "OSSpal: Finding and Evaluating Open Source Software," in Open Source Systems: Toward Robust Practices, ed. F. Balaguer et al., Springer Verlag, 2017, pp.193-203. (Proceedings OSS 2017) (16) A. I. Wasserman and D. T. Shewmake "Rapid prototyping of interactive information systems", ACM Software Eng. Notes, vol. 7, no. 5, pp.171 -180 1982 (17) https://opensource.org/status/alumni/ (18) https://ifip.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=148&Itemid=554 (19) https://ispma.org/fellows/

====== ======================================= ====== Twasserman (talk) 00:07, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Hi, I'd be glad to have a look over the coming days. Just note it might be a while before I get through all these citations. FYI, stuff like "Wasserman led development of the Software Management MS curriculum" needs proper attribution. PK650 (talk) 00:54, 25 March 2023 (UTC)