Bryan W. Klein

Bryan W. Klein is an information technology specialist in the Fire Fighting Technology Group of the Fire Research Division (FRD) of the Engineering Laboratory (EL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Mr. Klein recently came to the Fire Fighting Technology (FFT) Group with a focus on efforts within the Advanced Fire Service Technologies Program.

Prior to joining the FFT Group, Mr. Klein was a member of the Fire Modeling Group. His primary work with the Fire Modeling Group was to assist in the development and support of the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) and promoting its use across the United States and Internationally. One of his first assignments at NIST was to modernize the development methodology, support and distribution of the FDS software.  By utilizing freely available web services provided by Google (Google Code, Google Groups), this set of tasks was quickly accomplished within the first 6 months at NIST.  Afterward, time was taken to introduce standard software development best practices to the development team, such as;, code revision management, standardized version scheme, publicly available bug reporting and issue tracking system, and integrating change logs into the documentation.  By bringing a host of new services and support features online the FDS Development Team has been able to tap into the global user community as a development resource, and provide immediate feedback from reported bugs and questions regarding the software.

These efforts have brought more consistency and stability to the FDS project and allows the development group the freedom to rapidly integrate new changes to the software and documentation in parallel, eliminating the serial development bottleneck of the past.  Before these systems and practices were put in place, changes to FDS source and documentation were funneled through the lead developer, each change from the development team had to be woven into the evolving source code by him manually and then tested and recompiled.  Now each developer has direct access to the latest version of the source code through Subversion and can test their changes locally before committing it into the repository.  By enforcing the standard practice of "update, modify, update, test, update, commit, repeat..." into the work flow, the development team is always working with the most recent version of source and reduces conflicts resulting from parallel modifications to source code.