Casey to Lead Company’s High-Velocity Engineering Practice in Rapidly Delivering Innovation to Customers;
Analytics Expert Nicole Forsgren, Ph.D., Joins Chef to Bolster Data-Driven Continual Development Process
SEATTLE – March 23, 2015 –Chef, the leader in high-velocity IT automation, today announced James Casey has been appointed Vice President of Engineering. Casey has more than a decade of experience managing engineering and operations for CERN and is a three-year Chef veteran. Casey brings deep expertise in DevOps practices, as well as an innate understanding of the needs of Chef customers and the community. Casey will oversee the quality and cadence of product development for Chef’s engineering and operations teams, and will report to Chef CEO Barry Crist.
Chef’s engineering practice is designed to continually accelerate the delivery of innovative products to customers and itself set the bar for high velocity software development. Casey leads Chef’s development and operations teams, and joins Chef CTO Adam Jacob and Chef vice president Jez Humble in driving constant improvement of Chef’s engineering speed and quality. Casey is responsible for managing all of engineering, while Jacob focuses on product and open source strategy, and Humble drives Chef’s analytical approach to engineering process evolution and refinement.
“Over the last three years James has proved he is the best person to now run our engineering and operations teams,” said Crist. “He has distinguished himself both as a technical and business leader. His expansive knowledge of DevOps and experience with our community, as well as his strong rapport with our customer base, puts him in a perfect position to lead the evolution of Chef’s automation platform.”
Chef also today announced that Nicole Forsgren, Ph.D., has joined Chef as Director of Organizational Performance and Analytics. Forsgren is the lead investigator behind the 2014 State of DevOps Report, which she and Humble worked on together to measure the business impact of DevOps. Forsgren brings her expertise in analytics and DevOps patterns to help Chef become the most efficient engineering organization in the industry.
“I’m incredibly excited to have Nicole join our fast-growing Chef team,” said Humble. “Her analytical chops and command of statistics are unrivalled, and she’ll play a key role in driving our metrics-guided approach to engineering.”
Prior to joining Chef, Casey was Director of Operations at Simple, an online banking company. Prior to Simple, Casey worked at CERN in several technical and management roles for the IT department. Earlier in his career Casey held software developer positions at a range of organizations. He holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Trinity College, Dublin, and a Master of Science from University College, London.
Forsgren was most recently Professor of Management Information Systems and Accounting at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University. In addition to being the lead investigator on the 2014 State of DevOps report, Nicole chaired the 2014 USENIX LISA conference and worked in enterprise storage at IBM for several years. She holds a Ph.D. in Management Information Systems and a Masters in Accounting from the University of Arizona.
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