Ram Chillarege

Inventor of Orthogonal Defect Classification (ODC) technology, Chillarege has fundamentally enriched the management of software engineering. While at IBM Research, he founded the Center of Software Engineering and authored the seminal IBM Academy Study on Software Testing — an organization that implemented ODC across the company, impacting tens of thousands of engineers. After 14 years at IBM, he joined Opus360, New York, as Executive Vice President of Software and Technology. He has also served as founder of Chillarege Inc. and as a consultant in ODC from 2001.

He received his M.E. and B.E. degrees from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and his B.Sc. degree from the University of Mysore, one of India's premier institutions of higher learning. Chillarege earned his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He received IBM's Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for ODC.

ODC is an expansive body of work that brought new methods to the business of managing software engineering operations. Its development from concept to large-scale rollout spanned a decade, culminating with implementation programs worldwide, reaching thousands of engineers at IBM. Chillarege has been an active speaker at conferences and continues to publish, adding to his collection of over 50 peer-reviewed professional articles.

In 2002, Chillarege received the IEEE Technical Achievement Award, "For invention of Orthogonal Defect Classification and contributions to advances in software engineering measurements and analysis." He chaired the Charter group for Software Reliability, the 1996 and 2005 IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE), and the 1997 Fault-Tolerant Computing Symposium (FTCS). He has also served on the Board of the University of Illinois Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Reliability.