This week I started fresh with a new company and a new title. After four years as a Software Development Manager and a short stint as an Enterprise Architecture Manager I’ve now returned to managing a group of internal IT developers. The current title is Application Development Manager.
The new organization is full of opportunities and challenges. Some of these include:
- Inheriting a senior development team.
- An organization which is still early in the process of formulating practices and process.
- High level support for process improvement a mix of CMMI, ITIL, PMI, and a bit of RUP at present.
- Systems with real high availability requirements.
- A JBoss shop.
- A QA team pushing hard to push for quality throughout the project and not just at the end. Plus they’re doing automation and load/performance tuning.
- Developers self-organizing a weekly gathering to discuss software topics.
I wake up about 5 am these days to go for a walk every morning. These days it’s a lot easier to bounce up and not just hit the snooze button. If I can get Perforce setup with a Hudson plugin I might just set up a continuous build box tomorrow.