He graduated from the University of Otago, New Zealand, with a B.Sc., (Honours) in Mathematics in 1983 and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, USA, in 1990. He has published over 170 papers in journals and internationally-refereed conferences, mainly in the areas of software reuse, software tools, and software metrics. His current research is developing metrics for measuring the quality of software designs. He is the developer and maintainer of the Qualitas Corpus Organizers