Software Process in a Growing Startup

April 1, 2004

Location: Lind Hall 305

Meeting Abstract:

This seminar explores the software development process of one particular organization as it progressed from its humble beginnings of 3 people to a world-wide leader of eCommerce outsourcing solutions with over 500 employees, of which 75 are in software development.  The seminar describes both the business and technology landscape of this particular situation that directly impacted how software is and was developed in terms of speed, quality, and process maturity.  Finally, a set of lessons learned is presented that describe the things that were run into that caused significant impact to the software development organization.

About the Speaker:

Jim Pichler started his career working at a computer equipment distribution company in Edina, Technology Squared. His was responsible for all IT services for the company, which at the time of hire in 1992, had 12 employees. Some notable projects were an early generation computer telephony system for predictive dialing, the company's ERP implementation, and assisting in two division startups - DTP Direct and Airbourne Express from the technology side. In late 1995, he began working for a company that was spun off from Technology Squared, Digital River. He began implementing the technology for the business side of the organization, which consisted at the time of one salesperson and the CEO. He was the architect of the first version of the E-Commerce engine and co-architect of the second and third versions. He was the key driver of the technology team buildup including both software engineers and other IT professionals. He was involved in the initial fundraising effort, and has been a key contributing member of the technology side of the business for 8 years. His current title is Senior Director of SQA where he has implemented the CMM framework and is working on the software engineering processes and procedures.

Jim received his bachelor's degree from the University of Minnesota, Duluth in 1992 and has just received his Masters of Software Engineering from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in May of 2003. He has been an IEEE member for 15 years, has two published papers, and is active in various technology user groups.