Jan 2004 – Jan 2009 · 5 yrs

• Re-implemented Chordiant’s test and related organizations, moving from a 21-person distributed on-shore organization (CA, NH and UK) to a 70-person off-shore focused organization with leads in three on-shore US/EUR geographies. Increased coverage, per-person productivity and product throughput in the process while keeping absolute costs roughly the same, and grew footprint from testing two product lines to six. Ratio of on-shore to off-shore test personnel was successfully maintained at about 1:18.
• Managed operations for Chordiant’s Bangalore, India development center consisting of Test, Support, Development and related functions. Grew the center from 80 heads to 150 while lowering annualized attrition from above 30% to a sustained rate of 12%. Introduced an Operation Excellence campaign to get center focused on its key deliverables, and achieved or exceeded 92% of targets over a 15 month period.
• Championed the adoption of Agile processes throughout the engineering organization world-wide. This caught fire and become an engineering-wide initiative with many champions. Initiative has been conspicuously successful in 5 of 6 product lines with the remaining product line in the early phases of adoption. Demonstrated positive impact on product quality, productivity and schedule predictability for all teams adopting Agile / Scrum.
• Led initiative to establish a “second source” offshore vendor in the Central / Eastern Europe geography. Visited 12 vendor sites in 7 countries. Drove the selection / shortlist POC process which led to the successful selection and enablement of an ODC in Belarus.

Jan 2002 – Jan 2003 · 1 yr

• Cost-effectively grew Quality organization from 29 to 53 people by incremental addition of off-shore (India) and alternative workers. Aggressively addressed new product introductions, while increasing coverage more than 10-fold and maturing quality processes on existing products. Had only one undesired attrition in this time despite rapid pace of change.
• Introduced tools and metrics which enabled tracking and effective management of multiple simultaneous enterprise-scale application releases (an average of nearly 2 per month).
• Recruited and directed small, sharp team in the design and initial implementation phases of a state-of-the-art end-to-end test execution and results repository. Used XML as an abstract keyword-based scripting language to drastically lower test maintenance costs.

Jan 2000 – Jan 2002 · 2 yrs

• Led and contributed hands-on to the design, architecture and development of a completely new type of Enterprise Profitability Management analytic application (implemented using Java, XML, SOAP, Apache Tomcat/Struts, HTML, Perl, Javascript. Algorithms automated Decision Analysis processes.).
• Helped secure $5.5M in venture funding in one of the toughest software startup markets ever (late 2000/early 2001).
• Using an Agile Extreme development process, shipped first customer pilot application within 6 weeks of securing funding. Over the next 6 months, built an 11-person team and shipped two releases.

Jan 1998 – Jan 2000 · 2 yrs

• Built an 11-person team. Personally led company cross-functional quality council which managed 8 external product releases in a 16-month period.
• Personally developed 8,500 line-of-code keyword-driven build, release and system test automation system (in Perl). Personally implemented an OLE and Web-based real-time manual test results reporting system.

Jan 1996 – Jan 1998 · 2 yrs

• Built group from 2 engineers to 18 cross-functional members while managing through a merger and personally designing the initial application and supervising its development.
• Shipped the first application to be delivered post-merger by a joint NeXT / Apple team.
• Delivered technology used to deploy the initial version of the Apple Store and other high-profile e-commerce sites. The Apple Store delivered 24x7 uptime while taking 4.4 million hits and $500,000 in business in its first 12 hours of operation—one of the highest-volume e-commerce sites in production at that time—and received "Clio" and "Golden Pencil" honors for "Best Direct Marketing/Internet Commerce" site in 1998.
• Oversaw initial design and architecture of network management tools for Apple's next-generation operating system, OS X.

Jan 1993 – Jan 1996 · 3 yrs

• NeXT was acquired by Apple Computer in 1996
• Founded NeXT's first dedicated software quality organization. Built it into a 24 person department which, in addition to its operational role, developed and shipped revenue-producing ($3M in 18mo) software and services. Built a first-rate, highly creative staff and fostered their career growth and retention.
• Responsible for quality aspects of NeXT's entire software product line. Included a 5.25 million line, cross-platform Unix-based Object-Oriented operating system and RAD environment (NEXTStep); Portable Distributed Objects/D'OLE; WebObjects; and Enterprise Objects RDBMS framework.
• Set up and managed processes which delivered 23 of 27 customer releases in their committed quarters. Many releases shipped simultaneously cross-platform, cross-OS and localized.
• Championed the adoption of development processes, including extensive test automation systems and infrastructure, which reduced the time between "x.x" OS releases from a typical 18 months to as little as 4 months.
• Co-recipient of annual outstanding achievement award from Steve Jobs for my work with NEXTStep for Intel.
• Delivered a large number of customer briefings for top management.

Jan 1991 – Jan 1993 · 2 yrs

• Worked with Grady Booch and set up one of the first quality organizations in the world to work iteratively in parallel with object oriented (C++) software development. This project was used as a model in defining Rational’s RUP process.
• Key participant in GUI and application design for Rational Rose 1.0, a 230,000 line object-oriented analysis and design tool which has become an industry standard. At the time it shipped, Rose 1.0 was one of the largest commercial OO systems ever developed.
• Set up quality processes which resulted in only 0.04 customer discovered defects per 1,000 lines of code for a 1.0 product in first 4 months post-ship.

Jan 1989 – Jan 1991 · 2 yrs

• · Started as Senior Software Engineer; promoted to manager of department after 3 months on job.
• · Supervised 12 software engineers; was responsible for ports, enhancements and maintenance of company's core 250,000 line C and Informix based Unix warehouse management software.
• · Personally ported the HP-UX 3.1 version of the software to System V/386 v.3.2 in just 6 weeks.
• · Responsible for Systems Engineering and major performance enhancements in deployed systems.

Jan 1989 – Jan 1989 · 0 mo

• · Designed and implemented automated test and compiler validation suites in C and C++ for the initial release of Borland's Turbo C++ Compiler and Turbo Debugger packages, and in the spreadsheet language itself for numerical, statistical and "database" features of Borland's Quattro Pro spreadsheet product.
• · Contract was repeatedly renewed and I was verbally offered a full-time position, but I left after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake closed major highways leading from my home in Silicon Valley to Borland's Scotts Valley location, which was near the epicenter.

Jan 1982 – Jan 1989 · 7 yrs

• · Founded and ran an (on-shore) outsourced product development team which developed software for large organizations who labeled and distributed the systems under their own names.
• · Recruited, trained and managed small, sharp software development team which in 4 years produced 96 programs distributed in the U.S. and 5 other countries, in 2 spoken languages.
• · Worked directly with clients to interactively design and develop a wide range of custom vertical market software applications for Financial Planning, Education, Insurance, Real Estate and Retail Point-of-Sale. We began with a concept in the heads of the client, and delivered a finished commercial product, as well as providing on-going enhancement, support and maintenance services.
• · Personally designed, architected and project managed all "1.0" applications, and did hands-on coding (in C).