Company: Serena Software
Grade: Fellow
Title: Chief Agile Evangelist
Accomplishments:
- CSM training for over 250 employees
- CSPO training for over 100 employees
- Head of year long Quality Initiative
- Subject Matter expert for Agile product
- Speaking at User Groups
- Agile Consulting with customers
- Keynote speaking
- Product Owner for new product
Other Interests:
- Systems Theory (Cynefin)
- Automated Testing
- Lean
- Domain Driven Design
- Scala, Lift
- Ruby, Rails
Certifications:
- CSM, CSPO, CSP, CST, CEC
Jeff joined Serena in April, 2008 as a Fellow. His primary roles were to evangelize, teach and coach Agile within Serena, influence product direction to support Agile development, and to represent thought leadership of Serena in Agile.
In this role Jeff was able to contribute primarily through education and exposure to the latest tools and techniques. Serena as an older, established company needed continual prodding to keep up with the rapid changes in the software development world.
Jeff learned a great deal while at Serena, especially around the issues of implementing change in older companies.
Jeff left Serena in May, 2011.
Starting in the mid 1980s Jeff began to expand his technical expertise beyond assembly language and operating systems work. He began by exploring Lisp and helped Sorcim Corporation with an Artificial Intelligence lab. He then joined Tektronics as a sales person and was exposed to Smalltalk. This turned into nearly two decades of work promoting object oriented programming and Smalltalk. During that time Jeff established himself as an expert in objects and Smalltalk through his consulting firm. He also formed a company that sold Smalltalk testing tooling. He consulted with companies in different industries such as pharmaceutical, insurance, documentation systems, and software modeling.
Jeff developed the first visual modeling tool for object-oriented analysis, OOATool, under contract to Peter Coad. This tool predates UML.
Jeff has been very involved with the agile movement. Early on Jeff worked with Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham at Tektronics and was influenced by them. Jeff thinks of his first agile project as being in 1987, with regular delivery of fully tested increments to customers every six weeks. In 1993 he coached the team at Easel Corporation where Scrum started, working with Jeff Sutherland and John Scumniotales. As the agile movement grew, Jeff grew with it. He worked on various eXtreme Programming (XP) projects and helped develop the Certified Scrum Coach program for the Scrum Alliance. He is an acknowledged coach with experience in large scale adoptions of agile processes.
(1962 - mid-1980s)
Started in Software: 1962
First Job: Writing test code in assembly language, topic was satellite tracking
Hardware: IBM 1620, 1401; CDC 1604, 3600; Data General Nova; Intel 8048, 8080, 8085; Zilog z-80.
Programming Languages: Assembler (various), JOVIAL, PL/1, Basic, Pascal, Fortran, Forth
Roles:
Tester, developer; lead developer; architect; team lead, consultant.
Some of the Companies:
Data Dynamics, Atari, Amdahl, SDC, CDC, Pro-Link. Convergent Technologies, Extensys.
Areas:
Numerical Analysis; Applications, real-time applications; operating systems development and enhancements.
Jeff started in satellite tracking doing assembly language. He continued using assembler for nearly two decades with JOVIAL and PL/M experience as well. He did a good deal of operating systems work as well as micro-controller work as micros came online.
During this time Jeff had a primary focus on technology and advancing his knowledge as the technology changed. He purposely did not choose to enter into management.
While working Jeff begin his ongoing love of travel. Early on traveling and working (in software) in Australia and later living and working (in agriculture - Peace Corps) in Bolivia.