Ken Auer

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Ken Auer

Professional Background | On Starting RoleModel | Thoughts and Musings

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Ken Auer is CEO, Founder and Master Craftsman of RoleModel Software, Inc. He has been active in the development of object oriented software since 1985. Though he has spent the majority of this time applying his craft, he has also played a variety of managment and mentoring roles. He has worked with various dialects of Smalltalk since 1985. In early 1996 he began applying his skills to Java.

Ken has always approached software as a craft, being part engineer and part artist, being able to recognize the need to switch hats (and being able to switch hats) at a moment's notice. He is not only considered a Master Software Craftsman by his employees and clients, but also recognized as a leader in the object technology community.

He was a founding member of the Hillside Group, and is a pioneer in software patterns. He is a member of the XP Leadership Group, and has helped influence the direction of XP since its early days (back when Kent Beck was just a yahoo in a funny shirt - wait, he still wears funny shirts). For many years, he had a vision of building a Craftsteam™ working in a Software Studio. With the advent of XP, that vision has been realized at RoleModel Software.

Professional Background

Prior to founding RoleModel Software, Mr. Auer served as Director of Applied Technology at Knowledge Systems Corporation (KSC) in Cary, N.C. KSC had been a leader in Object Technology concentrating primarily on Smalltalk consulting and training services. Mr. Auer joined KSC in 1988 as one of the initial five employees and had been a well-recognized force in its clients' success and KSC's growth. At the time of his departure, KSC had been named to the Inc. 500 five years in a row, and had grown to a $10M company.

Ken came to KSC from Paradyne Corporation where he was one of the key designers of a distributed, multi-user network management system that was built using Unix, C, Informix SQL, Objective-C, and Smalltalk. Earlier, he had applied his skills to other applications using UNIX and C as well as other technologies such as Touch Screen applications.

Mr. Auer received his B.S. in Computer Science with a minor in Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1984.

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On Starting RoleModel

Ken started RoleModel in 1997. Although he had experience and a vision for building great software teams, he was working by himself, attempting to help others build their teams. He saw the inconsistency and decided to do something about it. The result became RoleModel. Ken was looking for a way to build great software, great software teams, and great software developers. Here are his thoughts on how RoleModel came about...

I consider myself a "reflective practioner" and technical leader. Many who have worked with me say that I'm gifted at looking at a piece of technology and figuring out how best to apply it (and how not to). I'm also very interested in the people side of getting software developed as I've seen so many projects go wrong due to everything but technology issues. Not to mention I think people are more important than things, even soft things.

In fact the "people" side of things is what eventually led me to leave the "software mercenary" life when I did. The corporate culture of Knowledge Systems Corporation (KSC) started as one that encouraged a great team to cross-fertilize each other with wisdom gained from doing practical stuff, while having great respect for the individual and their personal growth. As one person put it when we were talking about our corporate values, "We believe everyone has a life outside of work, or should get one." This never kept us from aspiring to (and accomplishing) great things...in fact, it did quite the contrary.

Due to variety of circumstances, things changed. I didn't want to work long hours and fly all over the country as a high-paid individual working through politics, mostly on projects I would have set up differently from the start.

The Lord used that time in my life to learn a lot about various aspects of business and solidify my thoughts on how a business should be run. Eventually He led me to take the step of faith and form my own company. Although I had a pretty good reputation in various pockets throughout the country, my family was more important than the prestige, so I decided to focus on work I could do while being at home almost every night. I examined what I could do best, and realized it was building long-lasting assets and teams.

Although I'd had a fair amount of success improving software and teams that were a mess before I got there, I found I was better at keeping things from getting to that state in the first place, and I enjoyed it more. Unfortunately, few people in the (RTP, NC) area knew that. My dream was to get a bunch of local clients with whom I would build great teams to build great software. But where could I start?

The first goal was to make sure my family ate without compromising on the travel and the quality of the work. The Lord sent the work and I did most of it by telecommuting. We had just begun homeschooling officially, and having everyone at home at once was really great. Being in the same building as my family had made a huge positive impact on our relationships and their ability to help me be more effective. I wouldn't trade that time for anything, but working by myself at home was far from building a team (other than the team of my family, which was doing fine and aren't really interested in or currently able to build software worth a lick. though I'm working with them a little on this as my children grow).

At the same time, the Lord was using what I was learning with respect to homeschooling, His church, and what I had learned all those years at KSC about the importance of life-on-life learning. I had been discussing eXtreme Programming with Kent Beck. What he was doing resonated with me based on my experience (there is not a single practice I hadn't done in some way, but never all together in the way he was suggesting/doing). People are more effective and grow more when they are working together toward a common goal.

I realized I was applying these principles well in other areas of my life, but pretty poorly in my current work. I had seen, been a part of, and created many productive and wholesome teams, but not since I started my business. I thought that there needed to be some way to have a collaborative team at work and have my family and other relationships integrated. Historically, I could find some examples of this. But I was living in the 1990s and it seemed like I was looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack.

Then, the work I was doing making myself known in the area and the Lord's timing kicked in. I started getting local clients. I started doing XP with great success for a week or two at a time, and was seeing most of the benefits on a small scale. Then I would go back to my office by myself. For a day, things were fine, but it became very obvious that it wasn't as good. I was more convinced than ever that I had to be part of a highly collaborative team, and a vision of an eXtreme Programming Software Studio™ began to form.

Clients were hiring me for my skills. They always appreciated the product, but were resistant to the process, even when they recognized how many problems they had using their "more traditional" approaches. They were hiring me as a highly-skilled software craftsman, but were not interested in adopting the approach I espoused to produce high quality software quickly. They chose not to see the connection between the way I did things and the results. I finally was led to build my own team with people who wanted to be part of a highly effective Software Craftsteam™.

We started by turning my attic into an office big enough for more than one and hired my first apprentice, Nathaniel Talbott. We'd have lunch together with the family whenever possible and he worked on getting some more of the infrastructure in place I needed to be more than a one person company while I helped him on some internal software projects. However, clients kept me away from the office as it was clear we couldn't fit their whole team in my office and they needed to be in the same place as other people they needed to collaborate with. Soon, we had a bigger project and a couple of others brewing and, as we added team members, it was clear we weren't going to be able to get everyone in the attic when they weren't at a client site and there was little flexibility as the house was not designed for such a thing and the neighborhood covenants wouldn't allow it if it did. If only I had had the vision earlier before I bought our home. I heard it said that life can only be understood in reverse, but must be lived forward. On to plan B.

There was an empty lot behind our house (outside of the neighborhood) that would have made a great place for an office. My wife and the children could come and go as it made sense, and others who were interested could live close by and enjoy the same privilege. Unfortunately, I quickly learned that zoning laws are extremely inflexible even when neighborhood covenants don't exist. and seem to be set up to prevent the kind of thing we were trying to do. I didn't seem to have much choice other than to cancel (or at least postpone) the vision, or figure out a reasonable intermediate step in a relatively short period of time.

I recognized that my children were still a bit small to help much in the business and the reality was that I was only going to miss a small portion of time with my wife and children if I could still have lunch with them. Though I also realized there were many other intangibles that would be missed, I decided that I'd bite the bullet and custom fit our current office into a business condo in the growing town of Holly Springs, 7-8 minutes away from home.

Longer term, we'd like to develop an area where many of us can have our houses in walking distance from where we live. We don't know how this will work out, but we're taking it one day at a time as the Lord leads. In the meantime, the children clean our office and other family members help us once in a while with odd jobs or catering for special events. We're always looking to evolve this situation.

Anyway, the Lord has given me an evolving vision of where we are heading with all of this. The current RoleModel mission statement uses some phrases that are jam-packed with meaning for me, but hard to articulate succinctly: Unusually Adaptable Software™, inter-generational, "where boundaries... are increasingly less signficant". But the Lord has brought an incredible team of people together that both share the vision and are helping to refine it. At RoleModel, we're realizing the benefits of putting all of these principles together and our customers are too. We're continually working to figure out additional ways these principles can make a practical difference in the way we live our lives and do business.

In many ways, what we've accomplished is far greater than I expected. In other ways, the journey has just begun and we can hardly wait to see what lies beyond the horizon.

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Thoughts and Musings

Ken is a thoughtful guy. Here is where you can find all the musings he considered worthy of release to the public.

Ken on what really matters...

Because I believe people are more important than things, when I'm not working, I spend very little time dealing with computers. Until I got serious about starting my own business I didn't even own my own.

After trying to run my own life and impress people for many years as to how important I was, I realized that any significance I have is due to what the Lord has done for me (I'll be happy to share how the Lord brought to this point to anyone who cares to hear it). I believe we are on this earth to serve God and in so doing, encourage others to reach their full potential by accepting Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior who will take them just as they are and then enable them to be all they can be (which is far more impressive than anything they can achieve on their own). I live in a semi-rural area south of Raleigh with my wife and two children and try to spend as much time as I can there with them and other people. I take my responsibilities of training up my child in the way she should go (Proverbs 22:6, Deuteronomy 6:4-9, Ephesians 6:4) and loving my wife as Christ loved the church (Ephesians 5:25) as two of the most important things I can do on this earth. As cool as software is, it is basically insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

I've built a trail system in the woods we own (and are adjacent to) and love being in the outdoors (hiking, walking through the stream, making smores by the campfire) and feel that being outside helps me focus on the One who created us all and the world which we live. If you're ever in the area and want to take a stroll through the woods and discuss patterns or life, look me up.

Joshua 24:15b "As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord."

Ken's views on life...

If you don't know this already, you'll probably learn that my view on life is that the personal and professional should not be as separate as we tend to make them. I think what works in personal life works in the workplace. Either way, we're dealing with individuals and we need to treat them and respect them as such. They certainly aren't interchangeable parts and each person has their own strengths and weaknesses. I strive to encourage individuals to reach the potential Jesus Christ wants them to reach and to give Him the glory for it.

Now don't get me wrong. I don't believe that when I (or anyone else) work as a consultant in helping a client build a system to help them meet their business needs, that I'll break into a sermon and bill them for it as consulting. No, I have to be providing the services that I'm under contract to deliver. If I don't do this with integrity, any words I might say are undermined by my actions. That certainly doesn't bring glory to God. On the contrary, if I don't preach a sermon by my actions, I can't expect that my politically incorrect stance of not avoiding the use of names and words like God, Jesus Christ, church, blessings, personal responsibility, morals, sin, etc. will do anything but turn people away from Jesus Christ and RoleModel Software.

Of course now that the company is much bigger than just myself, you might come in contact with people from RoleModel Software who are not nearly as bold as I am in stating their faith (and some who are more so). But you can expect to be dealing with a company where people are expected to work with integrity. You might say that this can be done without ever raising the name of God or Jesus Christ. That is certainly true. I do it every day. When a database isn't working as expected, I talk about the database and refer to the vendor's documentation, not Scripture. Yet, if it is important to speak the truth about everything else in life, why do so many draw the line when it comes to recognizing the One who gave us life? If someone asks me about my weekend, I might tell them about something that came up during our worship service. Someone else might talk about how they got smashed over the weekend. Both should be allowed as general exchange between individuals. If either discussion distracts people from getting their work done it is a problem that needs to be corrected. You'll find RoleModel Software people to be among the most industrious people you've ever seen…; so don't sweat it. We just don't put up boundaries around the First Amendment or more authoritative documents.

Not everyone who works for or with me is a professing Christian, and people who don't think the biggest danger in the world is allowing people to use the terms in italics above, usually have a great experience working with us whether or not they are professing Christians. We'd rather not work with people who are afraid of freedom of religion and speech, and they'd rather not work with us, so neither of us waste our time. It is much more dangerous to live in a world where the truth cannot be spoken. There are a lot of projects that have failed because people say what they think people want to hear rather than what they believe to be true.

I think my track record during my career has been characterized by integrity, although I'll be the first to admit that I've fallen short of the glory of God and He's certainly not done showing me areas in my life that need work. I know RoleModel doesn't have all the answers to every software problem, but I am confident we can add value to many software efforts in many ways. We also try to avoid jobs where we can't add value. I think people I've worked with confirm this, and provide evidence that I'm not deceiving myself or anyone else. You can find some additional thoughts of mine in various forms starting from my other home page on the WikiWikiWeb which is an awesome web site created by a dear friend and pillar of the object-oriented software community, Ward Cunningham. You can also find out more about my role in the patterns community there.

I'll also be adding more about my personal life here as time goes on, but as I said, you'll often see how they are not a separate thing for me really. In the meantime, here's some bullet items that I'll hopefully fill in details on later:

• I'm an elder at Southwest Wake Christian Assembly. We strive to be a church led by the Holy Spirit after Jesus' plan and the Biblical model. We focus on what the Bible teaches (responsibilities and relationships) about the church rather than what men have added. I focus on training men to be spiritual leaders of their families rather than couch potatoes that just accept what the world gives them. In the summer of '98, I spent the better part of two weeks in India training and encouraging church planters to approach their work from a Biblical perspective.
  
  
• I love my wife and my children and strive to lead my household in a way that encourages each of them to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ and to use their gifts and develop skills with which to serve the Lord. We've homeschooled our children since birth, and decided not to stop when Hope reached kindergarten age. We look at homeschooling as discipleship rather than an academic endeavor (though academic lessons are surely a part of it). Although we certainly recognize the benefit of gaining from knowledge of those outside of our immediate family, and provide some outside instruction, our core training is done through our life together.
  We've found that watching TV is, in general, a huge time-waster and would rather spend our time on more productive things that build relationships and bring glory to God. (See Ephesians 5:15-20)
  
  
• I love the outdoors, and like to get there every chance I get… but as I make all of the above a higher priority, I certainly don't do it as often as many diehard outdoorsmen. Hiking is a favorite activity as is getting out on the water (typically rivers) with a canoe or kayak. Hiking is something we can do as a family so it happens more often. With two younger children and a less adventurous (and more sane) wife, the water stuff doesn't happen as often.
  
  
• The Lord has used a lot of this to shape my current views on training which has led to our evolving apprenticeship model of entry into the company for those who don't already have all of the desired skills. Of course the reality is, we are all learning all of the time, and the role of master and apprentice can change at a moments notice.
  
  

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