Bill Reynolds

Austin Software Foundry, Inc.

Founder and President

1994 - 1999

My Second Career...Software Architecture

The trajectory of my professional career had been headed toward the intersection of business and technology since my undergraduate days in finance at UC Berkeley in the early 1980s.

  • My experience in the financial services industry during the 1980s provided me with firsthand knowledge of the difficulties faced by businesses trying to manipulate and analyze vast amounts of data for the purposes of strategic and tactical decision making.
  • My research into emerging software engineering techniques during my graduate studies at UT Austin led me to the idea of rapidly assembling software applications from small, modular parts and designing those parts based on known patterns or "molds." Architects like Christopher Alexander at UC Berkeley had begun to apply this idea of patterns to traditional building architecture, why not to software architecture?
  • Teaching graduate students and business professionals how these emerging technologies could be harnessed for competitive advantage made it clear that close collaboration and communication between developers and end-users was an essential element of success for information technology projects.

Intelligent Financial Perspectives morphs into Austin Software Foundry

In 1994, the pieces fell into place. My consulting practice at IFP had grown beyond financial services clients and projects into more general technology management consulting in various industries. My approach to projects had evolved into the design and implementation of methods and processes required to create modular, reusable software components. The analogies I had started to use were those of automobile parts manufacturers and of steel foundries prouring molten steel into molds or patterns.

Austin Software Foundry emerged from IFP when I opened an office in the Silicon Hills of Austin, Texas. The office included a state-of-the-art, networked technology training facility connected to the Internet. In these early days of the Internet, ASF obtained direct assignment of two Class C internet address blocks, several .com domain names, including foundry.com and financial.com, and created a "first-generation" web site.

Agile Software Development in the early 1990s

ASF’s mission was to promote the fundamental principles of object-oriented and component-based software development in combination with a rapid, iterative software engineering process. ASF's Advanced Solution Acceleration Process (ASAP) was one of the early lightweight, agile software development methods implemented in large companies seeking better outcomes and competitive advantage from technology projects.

I spent the next five years helping Fortune 1000 companies adopt object-oriented development and iterative project management techniques. I designed a software architecture framework (or blueprint) that would easily adapt itself to a rapid, agile development project. We called this the ASF Advanced Application Partitioning Toolkit (AdAPT). It gave developers a jumpstart on a modular software design. I also wrote a series of education and training courses based on the principles of ASF’s AdAPT architecture and ASAP techniques. These courses were taught in our own training facilities and licensed to large software development tool vendors for use in their education curriculum. ASF’s courses were delivered to thousands of project managers and developers throughout the U.S. and Western Europe during the 1990s

By 1999, ASF had grown from a spare bedroom in my home to two offices and three technology training centers. ASF had Fortune 1000 clients in industries ranging from healthcare to investment banking to wood products to aircraft manufacturing to energy production. Our services were focused on the technology groups in these companies. We offered education and training, project management and consulting, and software application development. Consulting to these companies was rewarding, but with the Internet rapidly maturing, I was itching to apply ASF’s approach to this truly distributed and open-computing infrastructure. In mid-1999, I negotiated the sale of ASF’s consulting and training divisions to a large, East Coast consulting firm. I retained the ASF brand and intellectual property without the overhead of staff and offices.