Steve Bannerman

Chief Technology Officer

SAP•  September 2020 - Present

Chief Development Architect is my internal title and I'm leading our cross-product architecture team and am a member of our leadership team, both of which are talented, experienced, and geographically dispersed. Our organization is building cloud products for the retail and consumer products industries, integrated with the on-premises SAP product suites of our existing customers, and open for integration with other on-premises and cloud product suites.

Chief Technology Officer

TimeClock Plus•  January 2016 - September 2020

For the first couple of years after we released the v7 product suite (in mid 2015), I spent a lot of my time helping the engineering organization refine the product suite as we began to help larger and larger customers (from thousands of employees to tens of thousands of employees). Then, for the next year or two, I spent most of my time evaluating the public cloud provider services relative to their fit for our product suite and putting together the technology roadmap for transforming our product suite from an on-premises/on-cloud hybrid to an on-cloud native. Finally, I supported the technology due-diligence efforts as we prepared for the company to be acquired and then helped communicate the strategic technology direction as the new company began its efforts toward scaling. TimeClock Plus was acquired by Providence in the fall of 2019.

Vice-President of Engineering

TimeClock Plus•  July 2007 - January 2016

My initial efforts were in providing technical leadership as we built several generations of successively improved product suites (on-premises, hybrid, on-cloud). Concurrent with those efforts were providing technical leadership as we mentored and developed our development team. Together, we executed the Scrum method with XP and other engineering practices and developed a high quality product and a highly capable development team.

Senior Software Engineer

Rocket Software•  September 2004 - June 2007

I had the opportunity to work with the talented client-server BPM team from Oak Grove and later with the team from Seagull, when we joined with them to complement their product offerings in the mainframe world. I helped the team in general, and in particular helped improve the performance of the BPM framework and applications. We leveraged Java and relational databases, bridging the gap with the Hibernate framework. Seagull was acquired by Rocket Software in mid 2007.

Senior Software Engineer

Simplify, Software Engineering•  May 2003 - September 2004

I had the opportunity to contribute to the climateprediction.net project at Oxford and also a large and ambitious project at the London Clearinghouse in London's financial district. The former leveraged grid computing (a forerunner to cloud computing) to execute climate model simulations and the latter was my first and only work so far in the financial domain. Both of these new domains were really interesting, having spent most of my career prior to that in the telecommunications domain. Simplify was a consulting company.

Principal Consultant

Applied Reasoning•  March 1996 - May 2003

I had the opportunity to work with some tremendous developers (and people in general) as we worked with Sprint and Sprint PCS to develop next generation network management applications. In particular, we incorporated TINA-C architectural ideas to manage ATM, Frame Relay, and TCP/IP networks on the ION project and provided operational systems to support 3G and early mobile internet gateways. I was able to provide technical leadership in the areas of architecture, analysis, design, and implementation (using Smalltalk, Java, Gemstone, and Oracle). Also, during this timeframe, I was introduced to automated testing and what later became known as test-driven development. Applied Reasoning became Mobile Reasoning after 2003.

Software Engineer

Knowledge Systems Corporation•  December 1994 - March 1996

I had the opportunity to work with a great group of people working on a suite of billing applications at Bell South in Birmingham, AL. I co-lead the technical leadership of the team and we benefited from our Bell South colleague who taught us the value of daily standup meetings (among other things). We developed the applications in Smalltalk and used a relational database for persistence. KSC no longer exists.

Software Engineer

Bell-Northern Research•  September 1993 - December 1994

I was able to work with a great group of developers on an ambitious project to replace the DMS-100 switching system software with an object-oriented version of its proprietary language (Protel to Protel 2). Unfortunately, the overall project was not successful. However, personally, it was beneficial as I was able to continue applying the Smalltalk skills I had learned at IBM while being immersed and trained in the telecommunications domain. Bell-Northern Research was the research unit of Northern Telecom, both of which no longer exist.

Software Engineer

IBM Canada•  May 1991 - September 1992

I had the privilege of working with a talented and experienced group that was very generous as they mentored me and as we all prototyped and developed an order management operational support application. We used the Smalltalk VPM environment to prototype the application, which was very influential on me and my eventual career path.

University of Oxford

Software Engineering, PhD•  January 2001 - December 2010

While I was still learning about what it means to research, I spent a lot of time focused on requirements specification (formal specification, use cases and scenarios, and informal specifications). Then, as I honed in on my research topic, I focused on empirical research of open-source Java projects and the relationships between automated testing and development team efficiency. The primary significant contributions to knowledge in my doctoral thesis were: (1) a formal software change model; (2) a measurement method related in part to that model; and (3) study results from a long-term empirical study of Java open-source projects showing significant correlations between automated testing and development team efficiency (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-010-9137-5 and https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:af9513ec-17d2-4918-9229-ee7f25708db1)

Southern Methodist University

Software Engineering, MS•  August 1997 - May 2000

When I started at SMU, I had been focused on software implementation for the previous 6 or 7 years. My courses during this degree really broadened my understanding of software development in general and have given me a framework for getting better in all areas of software development, implementation included. And, I found that I was able to apply what I was learning at school to my work on a daily basis and that I was able to bring what I was learning at work to inform what I was learning at school. I highly recommend this program.

Western University

Electrical Engineering, BS•  September 1989 - May 1993

During my time at Western, our class spent a lot of time using mathematics to model different aspects of electrical engineering. And, although I didn't know it at the time, these skills that I started to develop then have proven to be useful in my career in software development. In particular, it is sometimes useful to understand what goes on within our layers of abstraction and it is often useful to be able to analyze and to work with abstractions.