Tom Gilb was born in Pasadena in 1940, emigrated to London 1956, and to Norway 1958, where he joined IBM for 5 years, and where he resides, and works, when not traveling extensively.

He has mainly worked within the software engineering community, but since 1983 with Corporate Top Management problems, and since 1988 with large-scale systems engineering (Aircraft, Telecoms and Electronics).

He is an independent teacher, consultant and writer. He has published nine books, including the early coining of the term "Software Metrics" (1976) which is the recognized foundation ideas for IBM CMM/SEI CMM/CMMI Level 4.

He wrote "Principles of Software Engineering Management" (1988, in 2006 in 20th printing), and "Software Inspection" (1993, about 14th printing). Both titles are really systems engineering books in software disguise. His latest book is 'Competitive Engineering: A Handbook for Systems Engineering, Requirements Engineering, and Software Engineering Management Using Planguage', published by Elsevier, Summer 2005.

He is a frequent keynote speaker, invited speaker, panelist, and tutorial speaker at international conferences.

He has published hundreds of papers. One paper (Laws of Unreliability, Datamation, March 1975) gave his Laws of Unreliability (over 22,000 Google hits).

He has guest lectured at many dozens of universities (including U. C. Berkeley, Stanford, Seattle University, London School of Economics, University of Oslo, Technical University of Trondheim, TU Munich, Tampere and Helsinki Technical Universities, University of San Luis Obisbo, and The International Institute of Information Technology IIIT Bangalore.

He is recognized as the founder or major driver of several technical disciplines such as ‘software metrics’ and ‘evolutionary project management’, as well as being an innovative pioneer in Inspections, and the inventor of the planning language Planguage. He is directly recognized as the idea source for parts of the Agile and Extreme programming methods (primarily the incremental cycles). Tom and Kai have recently developed their own Agile Inspections and Agile Evolutionary Project Management processes, that are being successfully used by clients.

He consults and teaches in partnership with his son Kai Gilb, worldwide. He happily contributes teaching and consulting pro bono to developing countries (India, China, Russia for example), to Defense Organizations (UK, USA, Norway, NATO) and to charities (Norwegian Christian Aid and others).

He enjoys giving time to anyone, especially students, writers, consultants and teachers, who are interested in his ideas - or who have some good ideas of their own. He is a member of INCOSE (www.incose.org).

Kai Gilb was born in Norway in 1968. From 1987 lived in South Carolina, Hawaii and Los Angeles for about 5 years where he studied and worked as a commercial pilot and instructor as well as pursuing a career as a professional wind-surfer. Kai did his first course with Tom 1986, and switched career and started full time work with Tom in 1992. When not traveling, he now resides in Norway with his wife, and two kids.

Kai works in partnership with Tom, teaching, running workshops, consulting, starting up projects, saving projects, solving problems, lecturing, writing books and articles, course & lecture materials etc.

Many new ideas and concepts emerge from Kai. Often this happens as a result of his drive to simplifying the methods (getting rid of nice but not critical information), to purify them (distinguising one idea from another), and to observe 'life' (the methods should reflect what is, not make its own reality).

His pro-bono activities are focused around all aspects of the Art of Living Foundation where he organizes courses and talks, he teaches and he enjoys himself.

Kai is also involved with other Environmental (EPA) and Third-World Aid charities or organizations.