Humble Consulting

A better way to better software

Home

Agile
Projects

Coaching

Software
Development

Meeting
Facilitation

Resume

Contact

Chris Sims - The Humble Consultant

Summary
I have a track record of bringing high quality software to market efficiently. I do this through direct technical contribution, project management, training, and implementing effective development processes.

Work Experience
March 2005 - March 2006

• Led multiple development teams through successful pc and server software releases
• Initiated, mediated, and facilitated cross-departmental communication and planning
• Set engineering priorities to achieve broad business goals
• Recruited engineers from college and industry
• Established a formal training program for new engineering hires
• Personnel management of technical contributors and other managers
• Direct technical contribution, primarily in C++

April 2004 - March 2005

Led the team that built the next generation PC smart client for the FactSet application platform.  The new platform was needed to address an immediate competitive threat. 

• Took over leadership of the project as it was struggling
• Coordinated several large technical groups, located in three cities and on both coasts
• Created a release plan that got the most important functionality to market as quickly as possible
• Took on additional personnel management responsibilities to free up a key engineer
• Established quality standards and QA procedures
• Recruited and hired additional QA and development engineers
• Contributed C++ code
• Provided technical guidance to junior engineers
• Identified and groomed a successor for leadership of the group
• First version of the new smart client was released December 2004, and was adopted by clients more rapidly than any previous version
• Number of client reported bugs was lower than in previous versions

August 2000 - March 2004

Worked on a team to develop the Active Publishing Workstation (APW) application, which seamlessly integrates FactSet's functionality into Word, PowerPoint, and Excel to automate the creation of pitch books for the investment banking industry.  This was the most ambitious PC application that FactSet had attempted thus far with respect to size, scope, complexity, and time to market.  After one year on the project I was made the project leader.

• Led core team of 4 developers, project manager, plus several satellite groups
• Used C++, VB, ATL, and MFC to create COM objects which integrated directly into the Microsoft applications
• Made significant architectural and design contributions
• Mentored and managed other engineers and product managers
• Introduced agile development methods, based on Extreme Programming
• Introduced formal QA processes, including automated unit and regression tests, manual white-box and black-box testing
• Introduced structured alpha and beta release process
• Led the project through 6 releases which were delivered on-time, feature complete, and with measurably high quality
• APW has been adopted by most major investment banks and generates tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue

July 1998 - August 2000

Created a thread-safe COM API to expose the power of the FactSet client-server system to Windows developers   

• Solely responsible for requirements gathering, implementation, testing, documentation, and support. 
• Visual C++ and MFC on Windows,  C++ on VMS 
• Released in March of 1999
• Generates over a million dollars a year in revenue.

Created advanced versions of C++ ASSERT and VERIFY for FactSet's VMS production environment

• Provides additional information at run-time including who inserted the assertion and why
• Runtime VERIFY efficiently logs occurrences in production
• Developers receive daily email summaries of runtime VERIFY instances
• C++, Perl, XML
• Released into production July 1999

Built a secure client authentication system for the Web, using digital certificates.  

• Solely responsible for requirements gathering, implementation, testing, documentation, and support.
• Implemented an ISAPI module in Visual Basic for Microsoft's IIS web-server
• Supporting COM components built using Visual C++ and ATL
• Created ASP pages and CSS
• Created an installation program in Visual Basic
• Prototyped with Jet Database (Access) and migrated to SQL Sever
• Initial release in March 2000 met time-to-market goal
• Additional releases in June and August added incremental functionality