Mark Levison

Agile Coach, Consultant, Editor @ InfoQ with over 20 years industry experience.

Mark Levison has been noodling around the software industry for more than twenty years now. He has programmed in Pascal, C, C++, Java, Python and C#. In his time he has written rich clients (weren’t they once called applications) for every platform imaginable, DOS, X Windows/Motif, Windows MFC, Swing, WinForms and Eclipse Rich Clients.

Somewhere along the way he got tired of the chaos that surrounds most software projects and started to study process. At first trying Coad/Yourdon’s OOA/D and Grady Booch’s Rational process – he spent a lot of time trying to perfect UML diagrams and not much time writing code.

Realizing that there had to be a better way he started digging and in early 2001 stumbled across the Agile manifesto. It took a few years but now Mark feels much less pain when developing

At Databeacon, Cognos and IBM I introduced Agile practices and provided Agile training
• Introduced Scrum to Cognos over three years ago
• Introduced Agile Engineering Practices to Databeacon (Unit Testing, Continuous Integration, Refactoring)
• Coached four teams at Cognos (Agile Practices, Audited Meetings, Asked Questions of Leadership).
• Ran tutorials on Unit Testing and Test Driven Development at both Databeacon and Cognos
• Coached Test Driven Development with a number of Developers at Cognos.
• Initiated Process improvement at Databeacon including Code Inspections, Self Organizing Teams, Milestones and Weekly Status Reporting.
• Wrote and Presented “Scrum in a Nutshell” an hour long presentation that outlines Scrum.

I am...

• Expert in Scrum, Lean and Agile Engineering Practices.
• Experienced conference speaker at agile conferences and user groups.
• Technical experience includes shipping many applications in C/C++/Java and .NET

Recent interests include the application of Agile outside development - including Operations, Support, Sales and Marketing.