Ravenbrook Ravenbrook is a software engineering consultancy. Our goal is to increase the value of the software industry to society.

Richard Brooksby

Founder, Director, and Senior Consultant.

Motto: Do the right thing.

Expertise

  • Senior software engineering manager with experience in senior management, company administration, general management, software process management, product management, and software development.
  • Demonstrated success at building and organizing highly effective development teams producing software that meets and exceeds customer expectations.
  • Deep understanding of technical and managerial issues affecting software quality.
  • Able to motivate and focus development teams on company goals.
  • Proven inter-group and cross-functional communication skills.
  • Experience of rapid company growth.
  • Twenty five years of software development experience at all levels and in numerous languages and environments.

Experience

Senior Consultant, Ravenbrook Limited, 1997 - present

  • Numerous product strategy, project management, and software process consultancy engagements for various well known software organizations.
  • Created new product vision for Geodesic Systems based on market analysis and core competencies. Developed strategic, medium, and short term product development plans based on new vision. Created highly successful board presentation which changed the direction of the company.

Company Director, Ravenbrook Limited, 1997 - present

  • Company and business administration, marketing, contract & legal, finance, etc.

Project Manager, Perforce Defect Tracking Integration, Ravenbrook Limited, 2000 - 2001

  • Carried out detailed analysis of Perforce's market and recommended project to Perforce Software.
  • Planned project (including alpha and beta programmes) with detailed budgets.
  • Executed use case and technical requirements analysis, proposed and analysed architectures, selected and liaised with co-operating vendors.
  • Managed project to completion, delivering in 2001-04 both on-time and to budget.

VP of Engineering and Development, Geodesic Systems, 1999 - 2000

  • Managed engineering team of software, web, quality, and production engineers developing Geodesic's flagship product. Structured the team into functional groups, recruited group managers, and developed department processes.
  • Implemented an evolutionary planning process in co-operation with sales and marketing. Shifted department focus to plan execution, to the point where deliverables were produced on time at high quality.
  • Planned and executed the unification of seven diverging codelines to create single source, documentation, and design codeline, eliminating duplicated effort and increasing productivity and quality.

Systems Architect, Geodesic Systems, 1998

  • Planned and implemented a program of software engineering process improvement, based on the Capability Maturity Model, resulting in improved delivery of software from the development group.
  • Lifted the development organization half-way from CMM level 1 (chaotic) to CMM level 2 (repeatable) in less than six months.
  • Defined and implemented a change management process and configuration management system.
  • Designed, created, and managed the company information system.
  • Instrumental in the improvement of general company infrastructure, from network management to documentation standards.
  • Developed requirements management, specification, planning and tracking processes in order to bring company to level 2 of the Capability Maturity Model.

Group Manager - Memory Management Group, Harlequin, 1995 - 1997

  • Conceived and created a highly portable, robust, and innovative memory management system including advanced garbage collection abilities. The system was successfully delivered into widely differing internal projects.
  • Achieved an extremely low bug rate — as low as 1 defect in six months.
  • Built and managed a highly effective team of engineers to develop and maintain the memory management system at an advanced level of software engineering process maturity (approximately CMM Level 3 plus defect prevention).

Senior Engineer - ESPRIT COMPARE Project, Harlequin, 1993 - 1995

  • Led and managed Harlequin's contribution to the ESPRIT COMPARE collaborative research project, the goal of which was a multi-language parallel compiler family. Harlequin's involvement was in parallel LISP and ML systems.
  • Quickly became a key figure in organizing and planning the entire COMPARE project, bringing together resources from six commercial and academic partners distributed throughout Europe.
  • Designed and implemented key parts of the run-time system of the CoSy compiler system, most of which are still in use today.
  • Triggered Harlequin's withdrawal from the project after analysis of the business case.

Software Engineer - ML Development Group, Harlequin, 1991 - 1993

  • Completed the MLWorks run-time system and garbage collector, taking an early non-functional prototype to production quality.
  • Designed and developed the MLWorks compiler optimization phase.

Education

  • 1991: MA, University of Cambridge (primarily Computer Science)
  • Advanced level mathematics, physics, computer science, and electronic systems.

Publications

Other

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