Sydney Randall Polk

SUMMARY

• Seasoned software manager with experience managing development, documentation, support, automated and manual testing, and release engineering for major software projects.
• Managed internationally distributed teams and offshore teams.
• Experienced software developer working on commercial shrink-wrapped software, open source software, developer tools, and enterprise software.
• Thorough grounding in all aspects of the software development life cycle, including requirements, implementation, integration and qualification.
• Adept at bringing together diverse people and teams within an organization and aligning work with business objectives.

EMPLOYMENT HISTORY

• Managed team of 3-5 QA Leads, who managed quality teams for Lombardi’s enterprise products for Business Process Management, Teamworks and Blueprint.
• Optimized release process for Teamworks maintenance release, shortening qualification time by 20-40%.
• Changed direction of testing effort towards smaller, more automatable tests, which led to 30-50% more coverage of the application, and allowed 2-3x more tests to be executed during qualification phase.
• Developed and documented the Lombardi Software Release Process, leading to tighter schedules and fewer non-software issues after release.
• Grew the offshore team in Kiev, Ukraine from 5 to 12, and developed process and leadership in the Ukrainian managers and senior engineers.
• Developed automated software defect metrics system, allowing better governance of scope and schedule during our release cycles.

Apple Computer, Cupertino, California
Xcode Tools QA & Integration Manager, April 2001-April 2006

• Managed a team of 3 engineers in charge of verifying quality in cross-functional areas of the Xcode Tools distribution, the developer tools for Mac OS X. This included integration of the tools with each other, with the operating system, with applications across Apple, and in the field with developers.
• Automated testing of content of Xcode Tools and Mac OS X distributions. The incidence of inappropriate content shipping with tools or operating systems releases went to zero once these were in place.
• Automated verification of developer examples and build-time performance of the build system. Working with compiler and Xcode teams, achieved a 25x clock-time increase in build performance over two years.
• Verified the correctness of new versions and new architectures of gcc, Xcode and linker by building side versions of Mac OS X, including both diagnosis of build and runtime failures and working with project teams to correct them. Over a five-year period, each cycle of this testing built 25% more projects in 80% of the time.
• Coordinated cross-functional integrations between disparate teams within Apple, such as integrating 64-bit tools and runtime into Mac OS X.

Red Hat, Inc./Cygnus Solutions, Sunnyvale, California
Engineering Manager, November 1997-April 2001

• Managed 10 engineers assigned to several developer tools projects. Engineers were located across the world, including Germany, Australia, Brazil, United Kingdom, Canada, and multiple locations in the United States.
• Managed Source-Navigator, a commercial static source-code analysis tool and Integrated Envelope Environment. Direct reports included software engineers, documentation writers, and support personnel. Through several releases, optimized release process; last versions shipped on projected dates with identified scope and desired quality. Last version was fully localized to Japanese.
• Managed contract resources for open source developer tools, including gcc, gdb, linker, and gdb/tk. This organization generated $8 million in 2000.
• Project Manager for GnuPro releases, packages that delivered compilers and debuggers that targeted dozens of host systems and embedded chips built from one version of source code. Increased accuracy of scope and schedule, developed engineering and testing methodology, and trained engineers to use it.

Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Mountain View, California
Member of Technical Staff, March 1996 to November 1997

• Member of development team for Tcl/Tk, a popular cross-platform scripting environment.
• Lead engineer for native look-and-feel menu system for both Macintosh OS 8 and Microsoft Windows NT/95. Wrote extensive technical and end-user documentation. Developed using test-driven methodology, writing extensive unit tests.

Claris Corporation (now FileMaker, Inc.), Santa Clara, California
Software Engineer, June 1988-March 1996

• Member of development team for FileMaker Pro for Mac and Windows.
• Designed and developed Macintosh emulation layer.
• Designed and implemented GUI features in FileMaker, including the Value Lists feature.
• Sole engineer responsible for the design and implementation of the developer version of FileMaker, allowing FileMaker developers to develop and deploy standalone applications.
• Release engineer for FileMaker Pro. Developed FileMaker build system, installers, source-code control system, and integration tools. Trained Ireland-based localization team for same activities.

SKILLS

Programming languages – Expert in C (20+ years), SQL (5 years), Tcl/Tk (12 years; 2 years as core developer), Assembly, and Pascal. Other languages include Objective C, C++, Java, incrTcl, perl, and JavaScript.

Other programming technologies – Expert in FileMaker Pro (18 years; 6 years as core developer), GDI (5 years), Carbon (5 years), gcc (7 years), gdb (7 years), make (20+ years), CVS (10 years), autoconf, automake, libtool. Other technologies include JBoss, Microsoft SQL Server, sqlite, MySQL, WebSphere, WebLogic, Cocoa, POSIX, J2EE, dejagnu, expect, Xcode, Perforce, Subversion, UNIX, Linux, Solaris.

EDUCATION

"Project Management for Professionals", Project Management Institute, Spring 2008 (35 qualifying credits for Project Management Professional Certification).

REFERENCES