Anthony I. (Tony) Wasserman has spent much of his career working on software development methods and tools to support them, both in academia and industry. As an early contributor to the young field of software engineering, he developed the User Software Engineering methodology, recognizing that users were an important part of the development process, as well as the source of the domain-specific knowledge to help developers build systems that met the needs of their users. He recognized the need for an integrated set of tools to support the methodology, and led the design and development of a user interface prototyping tool, based on an executable model of state transition diagrams. This software suite was released under a BSD open source license, and was adopted by companies, as well as by university computer science departments. After co-editing books on Software Design Techniques and Software Development Environments with Prof. Peter Freeman, he came to understand that other methods also needed effective tool support.
That insight inspired him to start Interactive Development Environments, Inc. (IDE) in 1983 (and eventually to leave his tenured academic position at the University of California, San Francisco). At IDE, Tony served as President and CEO, leading the development of the innovative Software through Pictures (StP) integrated software engineering environment, first released in Fall 1984. IDE was among the first companies to include open source software in a commercial product, as well as among the first to generate database schemas and code fragments from a graphical interface. IDE became one of the first 100 dotcoms (No. 78) and StP became a leader in the technical software engineering space, running on a heterogeneous network of Unix workstations. The open architecture of StP enabled integration with other software tools, leading to the C Development Environment combining StP with a leading programming environment and technical documentation system. IDE then developed similar solutions for C++ and Ada. With this experience, Tony wrote the seminal paper “Tool Integration in Software Engineering Environment” that incorporated a shared database as a mechanism for tool integration.
In 1996, he was selected as a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM for these contributions to integrated software engineering environments. He was later chosen as a Fellow of IFIP and the International Software Product Management Association. In 2025, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Committee on Software Engineering.
After IDE was acquired, Tony joined Bluestone Software in 2000 (later acquired by H-P), where he led a team building early mobile apps to work with Bluestone’s application server. He then held executive positions at several startups. In 2005, he became a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University – Silicon Valley (CMUSV), where he led development of a MS program in Software Management, and taught courses on software product development, requirements analysis, software product strategy, open source software, and more. There, his research centered on evaluation, adoption, and use of open source software, and he has continued to work independently on that area after leaving CMUSV.
Currently, as Principal of Software Methods and Tools, he provides consulting services and executive coaching to software companies and tech founders. He is also an Advisor/Mentor for startups in the Berkeley SkyDeck accelerator.
His professional service includes roles in organizing many technical conferences, most recently serving as Program Chair for the Software Product Management Summit 2023 North America. He served two terms as a Director of the Open Source Initiative (2010-2016). He was a co-founder and first elected Chair of ACM’s SIG on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT). He has been a visiting professor at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, the Université de Genève, and the National University of Singapore.
Tony has published nearly 100 reviewed papers and edited 13 books. Tony has a Ph.D. in computer sciences from University of Wisconsin – Madison and a B.A. in mathematics and physics from the University of California, Berkeley.
He has had the good fortune to travel to more than 75 countries, and posts many of his photos on Flickr.