Remembering Tom Hadfield

I’ve learned that Tom Hadfield, a great friend and colleague, died last Wednesday. I first met Tom when I went to his Payroll team at Chrysler to teach Jim Odell’s Object-Oriented Analysis and Design class. Over the years I made many more trips to Detroit as Tom spearheaded a project to redevelop the payroll system in Smalltalk. Tom was a great combination of leader, business expert, project manager, and technologist who enjoyed figuring out how this new technology could work with a classic legacy system problem in a messy domain. Sadly the vendor that Chrysler picked to do the work didn’t listen to him enough, and Tom left to go to San Francisco.

Even after his departure, however, he still played a critical role, both for that project and the wider world of software development. As the project got into deep trouble he advised them to bring in Kent Beck and set up his the terms of his engagement. The result was the famous C3 project where Kent Beck first assembled the elements of Extreme Programming. Tom thus played a small yet critical role in the origins of agile software development. While writers and consultants like myself get (too) much of recognition for advances in software development, it doesn’t happen without shrewd and visionary leaders in big companies who are prepared to tackle the special challenges of innovating in an established organization.

Tom did many more things in San Francisco, although I didn’t get the chance to work with him as much as I had in Detroit. We were good friends, and I tried to catch up with him on my busy visits to San Francisco, although as time went on our meetings became harder to arrange and thus less frequent.

On my last trip out there I discovered that he had been battling cancer for the last couple of years, and he succumbed last week, peacefully in his sleep surrounded by friends and family.

I’ll miss Tom a lot, and again am regretting not getting to see a good friend before it’s too late. Professionally I always enjoyed Tom’s great mix of business, technical, and people skills. Personally I loved his sense of humor and excellent taste in restaurants.