After Tripwire's acquisition by Fortra (formerly HelpSystems), I took on a new role as a Senior Software Development Manager. In this role, I manage a team of 10 Software Engineers who support all aspects of Tripwire Enterprise, the flagship product of Fortra's Tripwire brand, from delivering new product capabilities to paying down technical debt on a nearly 20-year-old codebase to investigating and addressing escalated issues identified in our users' production environments.My goals are to engender awareness of (and focus on) the needs of our users who depend on Tripwire Enterprise to secure their cyber infrastructure, create an environment in which individuals can learn and experiment to grow themselves and our team, and to navigate (and leverage!) the constraints of a battle-tested (and, at times, battle-worn) product and platform.I meet my goals through effective relationship building with my team, my peers, and my organization, communicating clearly and consistently, holding myself and others accountable for results with kindness and empathy, emphasizing continuous and deliberate learning, and exploring new tools and techniques for getting work done.As a result of our hard work, extreme focus, and consistent execution, Tripwire Enterprise is experiencing a Renaissance at Fortra. We've delivered our most impactful product release in years, our development teams are engaged in what they do, and our users are excited to see what we've got coming next.

Developed and delivered a ten-week advanced Java programming course for upper-division undergraduate computer science majors. Topics include object-oriented programming, the standard Java API libraries, XML, unit testing, networking, graphical user interfaces, and concurrent programming. Class sizes have ranged from 12 to 60 students.http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~whitlockRecently, I've "inverted" the teaching style for the course: students view the lecture material on YouTube before class and we use class time to pair and mob programming. As a result, students receive a much more interactive and hands-on experience.

I supported and coached a team of four Agility Leaders on two coasts as they worked with other leaders at Tripwire to help people understand their work, execute confidently towards delivering high-quality results, and learn from their experiences. The Agility Enablement Team applied Agile, Lean, and DevOps principles and practices to Tripwire's mission of providing cybersecurity products and services that protect critical software and hardware infrastructure against malicious attacks.

I provided Agility services to a variety Teams that contribute to Tripwire's product development and delivery. In addition to my primary role of coaching cross-functional Scrum Teams in the R&D organization, I also facilitated the release execution team for our flagship product, Tripwire Enterprise, by raising the visibility of the work of seven development teams spread across three geographies and time zones and removing the inevitable impediments that arise in a program of this size.I also worked outside of product development to bring the Agile and Lean principles and practices to teams outside of product development. For instance, through my work with Tripwire's IT DevOps Team, we were able to provide better visibility, prioritization, and accountability for their team and identify the business value that their work enables. After an extensive rechartering exercise with Tripwire's Performance and Environmental Automation Team (the "Perf Team") , we achieved better alignment between product teams and the Perf Team, a process by which requests of the Perf Team can be identified and prioritized, and a clearly-articulated vision for improving Tripwire's product performance evaluation infrastructure.

I formed, led, and nurtured cross-functional Teams that used the Agile Scrum methodology to build and deliver software that monitors, assesses, and secures IT data centers. In addition to the traditional Scrum tools like Backlog Grooming, Sprint Planning, the Daily Scrum, and Sprint Reviews, I leveraged Project Chartering techniques and Human Systems Dynamics to help build a shared vision for what my Teams needs to do and inspect and adapt how we work.My Team worked hand-in-hand with our newly established User Experience (UX) Design group to build Asset View, a highly responsive user interface for classifying assets whose security posture is assessed by Tripwire Enterprise. Along the way, we learned how to quickly iterate on user interface design and implementation as we received feedback from potential users of the tool.I also led a Team of six offshore Developers and QA Engineers who worked with a local Product Owner and UX to deliver FastTrack, a simple user workflow for configuring how and when IT assets are monitored, assessed, and reported on by Tripwire Enterprise.As Tripwire's R&D organization grew, I established a Scrum Master Community of Practice that met weekly to share knowledge, collaborate on challenging cross-Team issues, and advance Agile at Tripwire. Our Community of Practice administered biannual Agile Practices Assessments and quarterly Team Support Surveys that provided insight into the skills, behaviors, and engagement of our Teams and Engineers. We also organized multiple Open Space events in which members of our R&D department engaged in an open flow of ideas to share what they know and collaborate on challenging issues.My background is in Software Engineering and I've had to learn a lot in order to fulfill the role of a Scrum Master. Beyond becoming a Certified Scrum Master, I've attended workshops offered by Johanna Rothman, Gil Broza, and Shane Hastie. I've also participated in the Agile Open Northwest Open Space.

I was a major contributor to the design and development of Tripwire Enterprise's "Automated Remediation" feature that allow users to easily adjust the configuration of the assets (update configuration files, configure services, etc.) that they monitored to improve their compliance with best-practice security policies. For this work, I was awarded multiple patents.

Developed new web-based services for academic and non-profit institutions. Worked with a team of 5 to develop an online Course Evaluation System for Stanford University that included single sign-on authentication from Stanford's student portal and advanced reports made available to faculty members.As part of a team of 4 developers, implemented a social networking application that allows current and prospective college students to compete for scholarships via participation in online discussion forums. The user community votes for which students should win scholarships. This work was chosen to be the new public face of CollegeNET: http://www.collegenet.com

I was originally hired to develop the object database component of the GemStone/J application server. In 2001, I became a lead developer of the GemFire distributed data cache for the Java platform. I employed advanced server-side Java programming techniques (concurrency, networking, bytecode enhancement, JMX management, garbage collection tuning, etc.) to provide a robust, scalable data frabric to large financial institutions. I also provided organizational leadership, introducing a team of 4-8 senior engineers to the Scrum agile software development methodology.