Thomas Zimmermann

Thomas Zimmermann is a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine, whose research includes empirical software engineering and software analytics. He previously worked at Microsoft Research.

Zimmermann coauthored a study of objectives and key results (OKRs) in software teams with Jenna Butler and Christian Bird. Using interviews and survey responses from one large software organization, the researchers examined how goals move from leadership priorities into team-level work. Their findings describe difficulties coordinating across teams with different outcomes and priorities. That evidence is relevant to OutcomesLab’s account of decision drift, but the paper does not define or measure alignment debt.