Donald Firesmith | |
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Donald Firesmith in 2006
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Born |
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma |
June 14, 1952
Residence | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania |
Nationality | United States |
Citizenship | United States |
Alma mater | Arizona State University |
Known for | Method Framework for Engineering System Architectures, Method engineering |
Scientific career | |
Fields | System engineering, software engineering, Requirements engineering, method engineering, and object-oriented design |
Institutions | Software Engineering Institute |
Donald G. Firesmith (born June 14, 1952) is an American software engineer, consultant, and trainer at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI).
Firesmith received his B.A. in Mathematics and German from Linfield College in 1975 and his M.A. in Mathematics from Arizona State University in 1977. He also studied one year at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Firesmith started working in the computer business as a software developer in 1979 and has been quality engineer, configuration manager, and data manager for Computer Science Corporation in the US, Germany, and Switzerland. From 1984 to 1988 he was an OO methodologist at Magnavox Electronic Systems Corporation. And from 1988 to 1995 he was President of Advanced Software Technology Specialists, a small consulting and training company. From 1994 to 1997 he has been an acquisition editor and editor and chief of Reference Books at SIGS Books. And further he was a Senior advisory software engineer at StorageTek, where he worked as a technical leader, requirements engineer, and software architect, Chief architect Lante Corporation, which specialized in producing eMarketplaces, and Chief architect for the North American Business Unit of Cambridge Technology Partners.
Since 2003 he is a Principal Engineer at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) where he works in the Client Technical Solutions (CTS) Software Solutions Division (SSD) helping the United States Government acquire software-intensive systems.
Firesmith was named a Distinguished Engineer by the Association of Computing Machinery in 2015.
Firesmith is a co-founder with Brian Henderson-Sellers and Ian Graham of the international OPEN Consortium. Firesmith was the principal developer of the OPEN Modeling Language (OML). Firesmith is the founder of the The OPEN Process Framework Repository Organization and the developer of its large repository of free, open-source, reusable method components.
The OPEN approach to software development is founded on situational method engineering (SME). This is a means by which a software development team can construct a method and process that is appropriate for their own particular situation or circumstances. Fragments of methods, conformant with an international software engineering metamodel standard such as ISO/IEC 24744 and stored in a repository, are individually selected and the method composed from these method fragments. The SME approach is based on research by many groups worldwide – results from a recent conference are published.