About MJ
I am a reformed “software architect” who now likes to focus on coaching and mentoring teams on the engineering practices that support Agile software development. I help teams achieve high code quality through practices of Test Driven Development (TDD), Refactoring, Continuous Integration, and Pair Programming. At Danube Technologies I’m sometimes called upon to evaluate how well a job candidate might play on a client’s Scrum team. I teach courses about Scrum and other topics.
I’ve had some success with traditional approaches (like waterfall), but find the Agile approaches generally work better for software development, and other kinds of new product development.
I helped develop a software tool to facilitate team self management called ScrumWorks. This is the only tool (besides a physical taskboard) that really supports Scrum properly, having been developed almost entirely by Scrum Trainers, Scrum Practitioners, and ScrumMasters. Every once in a while I hear about people trying to use Excel spreadsheets to manage backlogs — I guess they haven’t heard ScrumWorks Basic is free. ScrumWorks Pro is a whole ‘nuther beast, used by some of the largest Agile organizations in the world.
