Past (mid-1980s -2008)

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 developered 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.