How did I get here?

A long, long time ago (1962), I was born in Stockport, a decent sized town near Manchester in the north west of England. Twenty-seven years later, after obtaining a BSc (1^st Class) and a PhD at Sheffield Hallam University (thank-you, Mrs. Thatcher), I realized the error of my ways, and moved to work and live in Australia. There, I saw the light. Actually, I think it was the sun.

I commenced in January 1989 as an academic in Computer Science at the University of Wollongong. I had a lot of fun there, both work-wise and socially. I taught Software Engineering, Data Structures and Parallel Processing, and played with Transputers, which were still a cool (but slowly diminishing!) parallel processing technology. Still, Wollongong in 1989 wasn’t quite like it is now, and the lure of the big city, and a woman who subsequently became my wife, caused me to move on.

In June 1990, I started at Microsoft Australia as a Consultant Lecturer in the newly formed Microsoft Institute in Sydney. This was ostensibly a professional teaching and research role. But in those early days, it was in reality a professional teaching role, with, well, no research whatsoever! Still, it was an excellent learning experience (for me, and hopefully my students) working in a great company, and the money and perks were a pleasant incentive. Microsoft had just released Windows 3.0, and the Windows versus OS/2 wars were beginning, so it was an interesting time to be around, wandering the corridors and absorbing the battle tactics. I also got to do a fair bit of work in a consulting role, helping Microsoft customers develop distributed systems using, what seems now, very nascent networking technologies.

After two years, boredom set in due to the teaching load (15-20 FULL weeks each year, i.e. 40 hours a week contact), and in combination with a school headmaster-style boss, it seemed wise to seek more intellectually challenging pastures. In mid 1992, I moved across Sydney to the Eastern Suburbs, and became a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). This turned out to be a great move. The teaching load was low, the School was relatively wealthy and growing, the students were the best in Australia, and a whole bunch of new staff were leading a rejuvenation of the School’s research and teaching capability.

The highlights of my time at UNSW are too numerous to mention. The PARSE project got off the ground, and in conjunction with colleagues like Innes Ritchie, Jon Gray and Peter Croll, we did some good and highly productive software engineering/architecture research. I had some really smart and energetic graduate students, Alvin Chan, Lei Hu and Anna Liu, all of whom I subsequently hired in a later life. And I got to teach some interesting courses in Object-Oriented (OO) Software Engineering, and supervised a huge number of Honor’s thesis students.

This was also a time when I consolidated my professional teaching and consulting experience. I developed and taught courses for several IT consulting companies (none that now exist!), and got involved in some small consultancies on OO technologies. This sure supplemented that miserly academic salary. I also received a Research Fellowship with British Telecomm (BT Australia). This is how I started working in collaborative software engineering research and groupware technologies. I spent six weeks working with the BT groups, looking at their needs for collaborative software engineering technologies. This grew in to a three-year project funded by the Australian Research Council.

I was on a fixed term contract at UNSW. While negotiations were on-going to move to a continuing appointment in 1995, an opportunity arose at CSIRO, in the then-named Division of Information Technologies. The lure was a full-time senior researcher role, with a mandate to work with industry. My Microsoft experience had forever changed my aims in terms of research, and seeing practical software engineering needs addressed was a major motivator. This desire condemned me to that ‘dark world’ which exists between academia and the software industry. It’s not a world that is inhabited by many, as it seems to suffer from lack of recognition and distrust from both academia and, to a lesser extent, industry. In hindsight, I feel as though this condemned me to a future career in Government-funded R&D labs :-}.

The CSIRO experience was extremely positive. The lab was well funded, and I got to work with some high quality people. A lot of my time was spent leading the groupware work with BT Australia and Igor Hawryszkiewycz at the University of Technology, Sydney. I also got to help develop components of the Mentor software process, and indulged in my first real management experience, looking after a small group of five researchers in the Software Engineering Research Group (SERG).

As is CSIRO’s perennial want however, organizational changes were in the wind. Other projects in SERG were struggling both in terms of research and attracting funding, and my area was carrying the can. It was clear that the whole future of software engineering research in CSIRO was in the balance, and my boss at the time was likely to be heavily undermined. So in April 1997, an attractive offer from IBM Transarc was simply too good to turn down. I became a Technical Consultant based in Sydney, in a great old downtown office block that seemed to be surrounded for six months by the cast of the Matrix, making the first Matrix movie. I went for four weeks training in Pittsburgh in June, during which I learned a massive amount about DCE, Encina, distributed transaction processing, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Pittsburgh brew pubs and US beer in general.

Upon return, I jumped on a veritable merry-go-round of consulting engagements. Four weeks in Tokyo, a week in Seoul, some more time in the US, and then basically the best part of seven months at IBM New Zealand in Auckland and Wellington. This was a large telecommunications customer care project (~150 people), and was highly demanding in terms of architectures and design complexity. I also got to know Auckland rather well. A long hot summer ensured my time there, often spent in several week blocks, was incredibly pleasant. Strange coincidences and my enduring support for Manchester City also led to me hooking up with an entertaining social group – Thursday nights in Galbraiths were always an inviting mixture of jocularity, gossip, sport, politics and fine ales. A compelling combination, I still enjoy to this day.

The decision to leave Transarc was the hardest I’ve had to make professionally. Everything was going very well. I was promoted to Asia-Pacific Consulting Services Manger, the local group of consultants in Sydney was incredibly talented, and I was doing and learning more than in any previous role. The temptation was the opportunity to create a new software engineering R&D group in the now named Division of Mathematical and Information Sciences (CMIS) at good old CSIRO. As I’d anticipated, the old SERG group had been disbanded, the boss had departed along with most of the group, and a new direction was sought. With a decent-sized budget at hand, and the chance to do some research whose origins were in my Transarc work, I eventually succumbed, and re-joined CSIRO as an R&D Group Leader in July 1998.

A lot of things went initially very smoothly in this new role. I managed to hire a core group of talented researchers and engineers (including 2 former PhD students from UNSW). The Middleware Technology Evaluation (MTE) project turned out to be the right project at the right time, and brought us early and wide recognition. And we played a smart game internally, bringing in funding from industry and hence keeping management happy. During the next three and a half years, the Software Architectures and Component Technologies (SACT) group grew to 12 people, and became one of the three (from 20 or so) leading groups in CMIS, exceeding funding targets, creating an excellent client profile, and publishing some top quality research papers. A new R&D group based on networking technologies was also spun off from SACT, and this continues to thrive to this day.

This was an incredibly busy period. In addition to leading research projects and consulting engagements, I was responsible for business development, group management and career development. My responsibilities grew to around 20 people during this period, as I was promoted to become a Science and Industry Manager. This meant I became part of the Divisional Executive Committee, a group with a penchant for regular, long and questionably productive meetings in various obscure parts of Australia :-}

Once again, in 2000, change was in the CSIRO forecast. First, a new CEO was appointed, and the evangelical G3 period began. In nearly all ways, the changes that were promised made eminent sense, and it seems many good things have happened. However, it was clear that, déjà vu style, software engineering was unlikely to be a central research area embraced within the G3 vision. Again, in many ways, this made sense, but obviously had effects on SACT’s likely future. Simultaneously, the IT crash and internal management issues increased the reliance of the division on revenue-generating groups. This of course meant less emphasis on strategic research for SACT, and more near-term money making projects.

In February 2001, I took three weeks vacation touring Western Canadian ski resorts. After a fabulous time in, for the region, poor snow conditions – it was sunny and warm (!) – I found myself sat in a hotel room in Vancouver, working my way through a mountain of work related emails. One in particular caught my eye, from a software engineering mailing list. It described a Chief Architect position at a lab I’d never heard of, in a place in Washington State I’d never heard of. The thought of returning to my mad, chaotic job at CSIRO was so attractive that I immediately sent off my resume in response to the advertisement. The rest, as they say, is history, and several months later I arrived, in November 2001, to become the Chief Architect at IS&E in Richland, Washington State.

The Chief Architect role was extremely enjoyable. It had a mix of internally focused software engineering process improvement focused on architectures, acting as lead architect on several complex applications, and developing some cool ideas for new middleware technologies. It was also a lot of fun living in eastern Washington, especially once we got used to the small town environment.

The only real hassles were to do with being foreign nationals United States. I only had an H1B visa, and Jan couldn’t work at all. After two years, we managed to get her a work permit, but local opportunities were limited. This made a return to Sydney for her old job an alternative that was simply too good to turn down.

So, in March 2004, I’m started as Principal Senior Researcher in the Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) group at National ICT Australia, a centre of excellence for ICT research established recently by Australian Government. I led the software architecture research in ESE, worked on several software architecture research topics, and collaborated with some really smart folks like Jenny Liu, Liming Zhu and Muhammad Ali Babar. At first, NICTA was a pretty frustrating place to work. It was a new organization, and experiencing major growing pains. Luckily, after a year or so, the senior management ‘resigned’, and things started to look up straight away.

In early 2006, to our great surprise, we got summoned to the US Consulate in Sydney. We’d started a green card application while in the USA, and it had finally been transferred to Sydney for processing. Once we had the green cards, we had six months to move to the USA. Fortunately, Jan’s old employer still wanted her, and PNNL offered me a really exciting job. Hence we’re back in Richland, WA. This time for a while.