We feature Tim Rue as one of our chief consultant. Approaching 30 years of experience
in a wide
range of software development fields, he was a charter IEEE Certified Software Development
Professional (CSDP).
Though his experience in software development in the aerospace, communication, consumer
electronics, retail web site, medical and academic environments has covered a lot of territory, he
especially has a love for the product development world.
"I love to dig into a project and help my clients understand what they
really have. A lot of times,
I'm the translator in the meetings. Management looks at a stack of technical documents and
wonder what they really say. The technical guys are trying to communicate the risks they see and
get the information they need. Both sides of the table want the project to succeed, but they know
they've been bitten before.
"I help prevent the meeting where everyone is nodding their heads and
think they're agreeing, when
they're really not. I'll read the technical materials and look at the software leads and say,
'So,
you're doing <this certain thing>, right?' and they'll say, 'Yes, that's right.' Then,
a lot of times I'll
turn to marketing or the 'voice of the customer' rep and say, 'Is that what you want?' and they'll say
'Oh, no, not at all.' Then I help the two expertises (software and domain) get to what they really
want to build.
"Of course, in my business it helps to have made a lot of mistakes.
<smile> I can warn a project
team when they're forgetting that German often takes twice as much screen room as English or
that they didn't handle object deletion during the assignment case, etc. And since I've been there,
the software guys don't have to worry about my acting superior. I know they've usually spent
months getting to this point and they have their reasons for their decisions. I just help them
explore whether they've considered all the issues."