School of Business Administration, Portland State University

Robert Harmon, Ph.D., Professor of Marketing After earning his Ph.D. from Arizona State University in Marketing, Psychology, and Information Systems and other faculty affiliations including Arizona State University, American Graduate School of International Management (Thunderbird), and the Oregon Executive MBA Program, Dr. Harmon is now the Professor of Marketing and Technology Management at Portland State University. He has served two terms as Chairman of the Marketing Department.  He teaches courses in technology marketing, marketing strategy and product development.  Dr. Harmon is a recipient of the Oregon State Legislature's Faculty Excellence Award and the Earl Wantland Teaching Excellence Award at Portland State. He was an American Marketing Association Doctoral Consortium Fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

David Raffo, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Supply Logistics Management Following completion of his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University and the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Dr. Raffo currently holds the position of Associate Professor at Portland State University. He has a joint appointments in the School Business Administration (Information Systems and Supply & Logistics Management) and in the College of Engineering and Computer Science (Department of Computer Science). Dr. Raffo's research interests include: Software Process Design, Financial Analysis of Software Engineering Decisions, Process Simulation, and Value Based Software Engineering. Dr. Raffo has over thirty refereed publications in the field of software engineering and is co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Software Process: Improvement and Practice.

Grant Information

Dr. Harmon and Dr. Raffo received the Value-Based Software Engineering for Small Business grant sponsored by "Small Firm Collaborative R&D: Value-Based Software Engineering for Small Business", National Science Foundation, 1999-2002, in the amount of $250,000. The grant research seeks to link critical software architecture design decisions to the business goals affected by those decisions. VBSE brings together recent research in Customer Value Analysis (CVA), software architecture, and process modeling and improvement. The goal of the research is to develop and validate a set of lightweight analyses and software development processes that allow small-business software developers to move systematically from an understanding of strategic business goals to a software architecture that supports those goals over the long term. VBSE seeks to develop models of a systematic process for analyzing customer value, casting the results in terms of architectural quality requirements, and then developing architectural structures that satisfy those requirements. Work under this proposal has developed a process model and methodology for small business software development that integrates advanced product-line and architecture technologies from software engineering, with the business administration discipline of customer value engineering. The processes have been developed in collaboration with a small-business partner, Timberline Software of Beaverton, Oregon.

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