Richard Fennell
Chief Technology Officer at Black Marble
Bradford, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRichard Fennell is a seasoned technology leader and co-founder-turned-CTO of Black Marble, with roots in IT dating back to the late 1980s and a consistent focus on software engineering practices and Application Lifecycle Management. He combines hands-on DevOps and automation expertise—demonstrated by his Azure DevOps build/release extensions and significant contributions to Azure DevOps migration tools—with strategic responsibility for development processes and technology selection. A certified Scrum Master, Microsoft ALM MVP and ALM Ranger, Richard is a regular technical presenter across Europe who helps teams adopt robust ALM and CI/CD patterns. His background spans networking and systems work through to modern cloud-native delivery, reflecting a practical breadth from Novell and Unix-era engineering to today's pipeline automation. Based in Bradford, UK, he balances leadership with active open-source contributions under his rfennell handle, making him a rare CTO who still ships tooling used by other engineers.
9 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BSc Hons) Mathematical Sciences, Bachelor of Science (BSc Hons) Mathematical Sciences at The Open UniversityShelfield Comprehensive SchoolBachelor of Science (BSc Hons) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BSc Hons) Computer Science at University of Bradford
English
Github Skills (21)
azure-devops-server10
migration10
cicd10
release-management10
azure-devops10
build-automation10
dotnet-core10
version-control10
powershell10
csharp10
tfs10
database-migrations9
yaml9
database-migration9
net7
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
rfennell/AzurePipelines
Aug 2018 - Oct 2022
A single Repo to contain the source for ALL my Azure DevOps Build/Release Extensions. The packages can be found in the Azure DevOps Marketplace
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & Automation Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Automation EngineerContributions:76 commits in 4 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily contributed to the automation and improvement of Azure DevOps build and release pipelines. Their work involved implementing versioning strategies for Android applications and .NET projects. They also improved logging, updated build tasks, and addressed issues related to variable handling and build definition updates, indicating a focus on CI/CD and release management within the Azure DevOps environment.
marketplacevstsdevopspowershellextensions
nkdAgility/azure-devops-migration-tools
Nov 2016 - Feb 2017
Azure DevOps Migration Tools allow you to migrate Teams, Backlogs, Work Items, Tasks, Test Cases, and Plans & Suits from one Project to another in Azure DevOps / TFS both within the same Organisation, and between Organisations.
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:9 commits in 3 months
Contributions summary:Richard contributed significantly to the Azure DevOps migration tools, addressing multiple aspects of the migration process. They implemented logic to handle missing target work items during test plan migration, added a processor to copy Work Item Queries (WIQ), and modified the configuration for link queries. Furthermore, they improved attachment import by checking for failed imports and made several code changes regarding file replacements. Their work focused on enhancing the robustness and functionality of the migration tools.
casesazure-devops-migrtationtest-casesazure-devops-extensionmicrosoft
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