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Experience Summary
Karen is currently a
"Principal Scientist"
in the Industrial Software Systems (ISS) program of
ABB
Corporate Research,
located on
NC State University Centennial Campus
in the
Research Triangle Park
area of North Carolina.
She was initially a member of
Dr. Aldo Dagnino's
US
ASPI (ABB Software Process Initiative)
team, whose purpose was to provide guidance on business-goal-driven,
IDEALSM-based
continuous process improvement to ABB business units in the Americas and around the world,
using multiple models as appropriate.
Recent new directions for ISS include requirements engineering, software performance engineering,
software application security and architecture. Karen currently leads the Requirements Engineering
research area for ABB worldwide,
and a special empirical research project in
Global Software Development Collaboration Tools.
Karen has over 25 years of outstanding experience in the full software systems development life cycle,
as a software developer and as a manager of people, projects, and product lines.
Her industry experience includes steel manufacturing, health operations, aerospace, military, fleet logistics,
data networking, telecommunications, and ABB's power and automation technologies.
Karen's personal interests and strengths are
in both research and deployment
for coaching and supporting
"Agile Teams".
Karen was the first person to become both a SEI-authorized
Personal Software ProcessSM Instructor/Team Software ProcessSM Coach
and a
Certified ScrumMasterTM.
Her Wiki home page
and
the Agile Teams websites
were created in August 2003 to publicly support and evangelize this focus on effectively blending
agility and rigor.
Philosophy
Karen believes in
methodological pluralism
over
methodological purity:
there is
no silver bullet.
(For a great article on silver bullets, see Sarah Sheard's
"Life Cycle of a Silver Bullet").
Karen considers methodologies, lifecycle models, processes, and practices such as
PSP/TSP and agile to be 'tools' in the same way that
{programming languages, design methods, databases ...} are. She is committed to helping
the development teams she supports to choose and effectively use the tools that best fit their
(and their customers') needs.
Karen sustains a strong interest in the interpersonal factors that affect
effective teams.
She is a dedicated "Theory Y" proponent who believes the software systems world would be a better place if every manager
would just read and internalize Peopleware.
Her own MBTI evaluations over the years have migrated slightly from
INTJ
towards
INFP.
Methodologies
- Software development for over 15 years, including
real-time test, graphical, analytical, and database software systems
for the health operations, aerospace, datacomm/telecom, and fleet logistics industries.
- Configuration management,
CMM®-based
process improvement,
and management of sustaining software and
hardware group (people and multiple projects)
in a commercial data networking analysis company.
- Created and managed for two years a build and integration group
at a telecommunications 'startup' company which successfully applied many (but not all)
Scrum
techniques and
Extreme Programming
practices.
- Participant in a Triangle XP Users Group
XP Fest
workshop run by Ken Auer of
Role Model Software
- SEISM-authorized PSPSM
(PersonalSoftwareProcessSM)
Instructor, 2003-2007.
(Here's the
class photo with Watts Humphrey.)
- SEISM-authorized TSPSM
(Team Software ProcessSM)
Coach,
along with
Jan Höglund,
her ABB TSP coaching partner in Sweden, 2003-2007.
- Certified ScrumMasterTM
(see
class photo
with fellow student Dr. Aldo Dagnino
and instructor Ken Schwaber).
Karen found the
XP Fest
to be a great convincer that
Pair Programming
and
Test Driven Development
really can work; taking the
"Personal Software Process For Engineers"
class (a prerequisite to becoming an
authorized instructor)
was similarly convincing on a personal level.
TSP has already proven to work very well at ABB: see the writeup in the
SEI 2002 Annual Report.
Karen has collaborated closely with
Jan Höglund
on TSP and team-related research, such as the
TSP-EF (Team Software Process Evaluation Framework).
See her
Research and Deployment
page for details of her latest research projects, collaborations, and publications.
Education
Karen earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from the
University of Pittsburgh,
and a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from
Stevens Institute of Technology
(both summa cum laude).
In 2004, she was accepted into the PhD program of the
Computer Science Department of NC State University as a part-time student.
This work was paused in 2006 due to serious illness of a family member.
See Learning
for more details
(Karen's NCSU home page is no longer active).
In addition to her formal education,
Karen has taken many technical training courses over the years
(too many to list here),
in software development and management and in software process improvement.
She was selected to participate in the
PSP Certified Developer
beta exam
program which was held at
TUG 2005, and
was notified on Dec. 14 that she had passed!
(See SEI page listing the
SEI-Certified PSP Developers.)
Karen was one of ten people chosen in Fall 2006 to participate in the TSP Coach alpha certification test initiative,
which was held at
TUG 2006.
In conjunction with the Requirements Engineering research leadership, Karen has pursued
QFD training, and holds a provisional QFD Black Belt.
Karen has completed several training courses in software system architecture and CMMI for Acquisition,
and is exploring systematic migration of legacy systems to service-oriented architectures.
For fun, she experiments at home with CD-bootable Linux (KDE Live), Java, and various scripting languages.
Teaching (at ABB and at local universities)
- PSP/TSP:
- [Agile] Testing:
Guest-taught several lectures at
NC State University
and
Duke
on software verification & validation in Fall 2001, Fall 2003, and
Fall 2004.
Taught V&V (Verification and Validation) Fundamentals in Shanghai, China in Q4 2007.
- Teaches (and coaches) the
ABB "Gate Model" and how to perform
"gate assessments" within ABB.
Conferences
- IASTED:
SEA 2004
co-author,
SE 2008 and SE 2009
International Program Committee member
- International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE):
2005 and
2006 co-author
- International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE):
2005 co-author;
2006,
and
2009 (Quality in Requirements workshop)
co-author/attendee
- SEI Architecture Technology User Network Conference (SATURN):
presenter/author/attendee in
2009
and
2010
- Software Engineering Process Group (SEPG): repeat attendee,
presenter/author/attendee in
2004,
2005,
2009, and
2010
- Team Software Process:
2003,
2004, and
2005
TSP Users Group Conference presenter/attendee;
2006 TSP Symposium attendee;
2007, 2009, and 2010 TSP Symposium Program Committee member
Affiliations
Karen maintains membership interests in, among others:
6 Sigma for Software,
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM),
Agile Alliance, Agile Carolinas, Agile RTP,
IEEE Computer Society (Senior Member),
National Association of Female Executives (NAFE),
Project Management Institute (PMI®) NC chapter,
ResearcHers,
Scrum Alliance (for Certified ScrumMasters),
Software Engineering Institute,
Systers,
Triangle Web Technology Women (TW2, formerly WebGrrls),
Triangle XP Users Group,
and
Women In Technology International (RTP chapter).
When her travel schedule permits, she attends local meetings of these groups.
In her spare time, Karen serves as photographer and webmaster for
several emerging community-service sites, including
Club EHCF and
LCcure.org/DISCover A Cure.
Contact Information
Email her at
,
send her a message via
Facebook,
or find and 'fan' Agile Teams on Facebook.
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