Michael Cusumano is a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management specializing in the software business, platform strategy, and technology management. His research on software development practices — including comparative studies of Japanese and American software companies and studies of software process improvement — provides an independent academic perspective on software development effectiveness.
The IEEE Software Tutorial
Cusumano co-authored lean-software-development-tutorial-ieee-2012 with mary-poppendieck, published in IEEE Software in September 2012. This collaboration brought lean software development to the academic software engineering community in a peer-reviewed venue, complementing the practitioner-oriented books and conference presentations that had been the framework's primary distribution channel.
Cusumano's independent research on software development gave him the standing to engage with the Poppendiecks' framework not just as a co-presenter of their ideas but as a researcher with his own observations on software development effectiveness. His prior work on Japanese software companies was particularly relevant: he had studied how Japanese software development practices differed from Western approaches, and the Poppendiecks' lean framework — rooted in a Japanese manufacturing tradition — connected to themes in his own research.
Broader Research Context
Cusumano is perhaps best known in the software industry for "Competing on Internet Time" (1998, with David Yoffie) and for his books on platform strategy. His software development research, while less widely known than his platform work, includes careful empirical studies of how software organizations actually function — giving him a grounding in software development realities that complemented mary-poppendieck's practitioner experience when they collaborated on the IEEE tutorial.