Dr. Elizabeth (Betsy) Clark has been involved in the practical application of measurement for predicting, controlling and improving software process and product quality since 1979. She is currently Vice-President of Software Metrics, Inc, a consulting company she co-founded in 1983. She has worked with commercial clients, defense contractors and government organizations to generate objective forecasts of costs and schedules throughout the software lifecycle. She has designed measurement programs for organizations ranging from individual projects to entire business sectors encompassing tens of thousands of engineers.

Dr. Clark is a primary contributor to Practical Software Measurement: A Guide to Objective Program Insight. Dr, Clark is a certified PSM instructor and had conducted numerous PSM training classes and workshops within the United States and Australia. PSM focuses on analyzing the feasibility of estimates and plans and as well as comparing actual performance against plans. Dr. Clark has extensive experience working with projects in applying these analyses. She has also used other approaches, (e.g.,SLIM-Control) to track progress and predict cost and schedule to complete.

Through her affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analyses, Dr. Clark has extensive experience in performing independent cost analyses for government clients. Her experience covers a range of weapons platforms as well as large information systems.

Dr. Clark is currently working with Dr. Barry Boehm and Chris Abts to develop and calibrate a cost estimation model for COTS-intensive systems (COCOTS), under sponsorship of the Federal Aviation Administration.

Dr. Clark was a principle contributor to the Software Engineering Institute’s (SEI) core measures. While employed by the General Electric Company, Dr. Clark was one of four employees (out of 360,000) whose technical accomplishments were highlighted in General Electric's Annual Report for 1982. Dr. Clark received her B.A. from Stanford University in 1973 and her Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley in 1979.