Our Agile Development Blog Team and Roles

Welcome to this blog on Agile development. I am Jeff McKenna, the Chief Agile Evangelist at Serena Software, I will be leading this blogging effort and creating most of the content (see Blog Overview for our plans). In this effort, I hope to capture some of my random and perhaps not so random thoughts, musings, teachings and rants as they occur to me.

Here is a bit about my background. I have been involved in software development for over 45 years and have been actively participating in the creation and delivery of agile software development since 1987. I have been involved in all areas of software product development from programming, system design and architecture to project management, testing, sales and marketing. Since the late 1980s I have focused on the people/process side of development. Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales, and I created the Scrum methodology of agile software development in 1993 at Easel Corporation and started the very first Scrum team. (Little did we know what we were creating!)

I have worked extensively with object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications and was the Chair of OOPSLA in 1994 that helped to incubate and increase adoption of several related disciplines including agile software development. Working with IBM, Cigna, ObjectShare, Easel Corp, Millennium Pharmaceutical and the US Air Force, I provided expertise in architecture, design and implementation for their first Smalltalk based object-oriented projects. 

As an Architect at Rational Software (now IBM), I made various contributions to Rational’s industry leading Rose product. These included extensions to the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to support a UML model of testing.

I also worked with industry pioneers, including Grady Booch, to extend the Rational Rose product to natively support Design Patterns.
I am a Certified Scrum Coach, Certified Scrum Trainer and Scrum Master, I have taught, coached and mentored agile teams using Scrum and Extreme Programming practices for many companies, including Oracle, PayPal, Borland, Vanguard, Microsoft, Google, Lockheed Martin, Tumbleweed Communications, V-Mark and Net Objectives.

Philosophically I am a Buddhist and I love good food and race cars. My wife of more than 27 years is Cory.

Bill Ives

I have asked Bill Ives to join me in this effort. Bill is veteran blogger who writes for two group blogs on enterprise 2.0 (the AppGap and FastForward), as well as his own Portals and KM. Bill has helped Serena with its blogging efforts before (see Blogging Serena TAG), including covering my Serena TAG session on Agile Myth Busters.

Bill has served for over 25 years in leadership positions as a consultant in knowledge management, community building, and other business applications of emerging technologies. He has worked with large and small companies in a variety of industries, and is currently focused, as a consultant and writer, on what the new Web brings to business. Bill also participates in several search-based start-ups including iQuest, and Wikigazette. Prior to his present roles, Bill led the Knowledge Management - Portals Practice at a major consulting firm. Bill has a Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Toronto and conducted post-doc research on how media affects cognition at Harvard.

Bill’s oldest daughter spent two years in a Buddhist country, Mongolia, and he also likes their views, especially respect for women. He is a painter when not blogging.

Bill is engaged to provide a partner and outside perspective to the discussions. Since this blog is about conversations, we will be starting many of these conversations between ourselves. Operating under the model of two heads being better than one, at times Bill may interview me, challenge what I present, or act as a sounding board on discussions. In some cases he may contribute posts to offer another perspective. However, we will be clear on the authorship on all posts and list whether it is post by myself, Bill, or a combined effort. You see the author or authors as a category at the bottom of each post and browse the blogs in each category in our right side bar. We also do conversations between the two of us and they are categorized as Interviews. We see this as an opportunity to experiment with different models of conversation and blog collaboration in a transparent manner. We plan to have fun and hope it is contagious. We welcome your input.

David Socha

David Socha is another colleague who will be co-blogging with me. David is a long-term student of the human side of software development. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington, and has spent 18 years as a leader and programmer in a variety of software organizations.

I introduced David to agile practices back in 1999 when we both worked at Rational. As David recalls it, one day I said to him "Let's go to the bookstore. There is an interesting new book that I want to look at." That was Kent Beck's book Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change. According to David, software development has not been the same since for him. It made software development much more engaging. Ever since, he has been using agile practices and his people skills to help organizations improve their practices. He is a Certified ScrumMaster and Certified Product Owner, and has a particular fondness for biomimicry.

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