I lead a team of 16 developers implementing the Wiki-based collaboration platform Confluence. Everyone knows Wikipedia - we do something similar, but with a focus on enterprise customers and on agile knowledge-based organisations.
My main areas of work:
I manage the Confluence development project, its deliverables and its process. I maintain the product's release roadmap (delegating the creative work to product management and subteam managers), I ensure repeatable successful processes are in place and followed, I improve the process wherever possible by taking into account internal and external suggestions, I ensure that the status of the project is known to all developers, I watch over our quality processes, and encourage best coding practices and code reviews.
I keep the team happy and humming along. I use a wide variety of tools and methods for this. The most important one: Listening and talking to people. Sounds easy, but many managers get this completely wrong. Plenty of short, focussed meetings help us communicating what can't be communicated through email, blogs nor the wiki. The most important, focussed meetings are our daily Scrum-meetings, weekly product planning sessions, monthly One-on-One meetings with each team-member, regular team feedback meetings (short "process meetings" every three weeks, half-day "release retrospectives" every 3 months). Constant training, job rotation, and setting goals for personal growth and mediation when interpersonal problems arise are an important aspect of this role. I also conduct anonymous 360 degree feedback sessions and base salary and bonus recommendations on these, making sure that everyone's feedback (and not just mine) is considered.
I make sure the team can keep growing sanely. A year ago the team had just 8 developers, now there are 16 developers alreay and we won't stop growing anytime soon. I make sure the team is properly structured into subteams, that the subteams report to me and the rest of the team, that our team integrates well with the other departments like product management, marketing, sales, support and other development teams, that we use our assets in the most efficient way ("what can be outsourced to other parts of the company?", "what can we improve through training?", "where are our bottlenecks?", "who should we hire next?").
After the stress of the Wirecard project and no proper holiday in long time, I decided to take a break, travel around Australia and New Zealand, and take some time to write down all the stuff I had learnt so far about project management in IT. It turned out that this was a common pattern among the foreign hires at Atlassian, my current employer.
I led a team of twelve developers implementing the onlinebanking and credit card issuing systems "Wirecard" from scratch, using the latest J2EE tools like Spring 2, Hibernate 3 and AspectJ 5. I recruited developers, integrated new employees and external contractors into the team, optimized the development process, supervised code reviews and coordinated the dependencies to other development teams‘ products.
For more details please have a look at my reference letter:
Reference Letter by Martin Rusnak (Vice President of Software Development
Reference Letter by Gerhard Mueller (Co-Founder of TNG Consulting GmbH)
I was responsible for all technical and many non-technical aspects of the development of the electronic wallet solution CLICK2PAY.COM. My daily busines included resource-planning, release-management, evaluation of new technologies and tools as well as writing concept papers and discussing the future development of the product.
My work included lots of security-related issues because payment platforms like CLICK2PAY are very interesting targets to intruders. I coordinated all the aspects of application security. I assessed and dealt with risks like session hijacking, SQL-injection, crosssite-scripting, authentication and authorization issues and more.
Additionally I dealt with some organizational issues.
During my first months at the company I standardized the development process,
making use especially of the issue-tracking and workflow-software JIRA.
The director of the development department and I reorganized all aspects of the recruiting-process
from initial application screening and phone-interviews to individual assessment of applicants.
My work was focused on the core product of the company, the UML-Tool "Poseidon for UML" . I planned, designed, and implemented new frameworks within the Poseidon code (like commands, factories, mementi, visitors, and GUI components) which ultimately enabled full undo/redo-capabilities.
During my third year of work at Gentleware I conceived and implemented the multi-user Enterprise-Edition of Poseidon, which enables small groups of users to work in real-time on the same UML-models and diagrams. This was achieved by creating a proprietary framework built on Java RMI.
During my entire time at Gentleware I was also responsible for performance improvements, GUI-design, and the junit codebase, which covered several thousand test cases.
For more details please have a look at my reference letter:
Reference letter (german original) Part 1 Part 2
Reference letter (certified translation) Part 1 Part 2
My diploma thesis "A Refactoring Browser for UML" consisted of a theoretical part which I wrote at the university, and a programming part which I did at the company Gentleware AG. For the programming part I developed a Java-based refactoring browser plug-in for the UML-Tool “Poseidon for UML”. In addition I helped to develop “Poseidon for UML” and fixed bugs in the main program code.
While refocussing on my computer science studies, I only worked on smaller projects, ranging from a still very
popular room-sharing webapplication
for the student union to coaching the developers at "Zweitwerk GmbH" in XP techniques like code reviews and unit testing.
I also did some work in event management for the student union and for the
Pferdestall university cultural project,
organizing everything from smaller events to 1000+ people parties (from financing through advertising to coordinating the events)
The company Zweitwerk GmbH gave me the opportunity to work as an external contractor for the German newsmagazine DER SPIEGEL. I was employed in the text documentation department, where I designed and programmed an import tool which read and automatically categorized incoming newspaper articles from all major European newspapers and magazines. In cooperation with other contractors I helped to design and implement a new version of the company’s text database.
It had been formerly programmed in perl, and was then rewritten by us in Java, using both Oracle and the fulltext database Fulcrum. We primarily focused on enabling the employees to quickly identify, tag, and categorize articles that had been imported and not yet categorized by the import tool.
Astonishingly, major parts of my work are still in use today.
I left the company after the successful installation of the first version in order to continue my studies at the university,
which I had postponed in favor of this project.
I developed and maintained various software applications for customers of Zweitwerk GmbH. The company had standardized on the 4GL-Programming Platform "Omnis", which consisted of a procedural and very database-centered language, a comfortable IDE, and a (quite slow) interpreter. Using Omnis and the Sybase Database System, we developed software for real estate agents, computer magazine CDs, and image databases for major design agencies like Springer & Jacoby.
In late 1996 I pioneered developing prototypes in the (then new) programming language Java, which enabled
the company to participate in the project for the newsmagazine DER SPIEGEL.