Recent Blog Posts

  • My Clutter is Different
    By Johanna Rothman - Friday Jul, 4
    On the long weekends, Mark and I make a concerted effort to clean up the house. That means I have to address all my little piles: go through them, recycle what I can, throw out what can’t be rec... more »
  • New Tools Section
    By Ryan Shriver - Thursday Jul, 3
    One of the things that helps reenforce new concepts, like the ones I���m teaching, are simple tools that guide you along the way. Like a carpenter���s square, hand plane or ruler, simple tools can be ... more »
  • It’s ok to wet yourself every once in awhile
    By Andrew Glover - Tuesday Jul, 1
    Dan North, the veritable progenitor of behavior driven development (or BDD), recently blogged about unnecessary DRYness (meaning don’t repeat yourself) with respect to clarity of intent when it ... more »
  • Expert Panel at Agile Experience
    By Neal Ford - Tuesday Jul, 1
    Last weekend, I spoke at the Agile Experience in Reston. It was a great conference, lots of interesting topics, and a different crowd than most technical conferences. Half the attendees were managers,... more »
  • easyb 0.9 hits the streets
    By Andrew Glover - Monday Jun, 30
    The easyb team is pleased to announce the release of easyb 0.9, baby! The 0.9 release has: Numerous IntelliJ plug-in improvements The easyb plugin for IntelliJ can now be downloaded directly from w... more »

In the Spotlight - Mark Johnson

Director of Consulting at CGI

Mark Johnson is currently Director of Consulting at CGI where he is exploring software development management approaches to leverage offshore and local development resources to deliver high quality applications on-time and budget in a highly competitive environment.

Mark Johnson has over 20 years of software development experience in industries including Healthcare, state government, and strategic sourcing. Mark most recently has spent the last 2 years working with Commonwealth of Massachusets EOHHS to develop the NewMMIS application. The NewMMIS application makes use of J2EE, Portal, and Web Services technologies designed to modernize the existing Medicaid processing. In addition, Mark is active in the software community as the President of the New England Java Users Group. When not working, Mark can be found riding his mountain bike on local trails and playing with his family.





















Presentations by Mark Johnson

The Software Development Manager's Dashboard

Development teams are increasingly scattered all over the world, often a development manager now days will never meet the entire team face to face.

Software Development Risk Management

Once you leave academic "hello world" projects, software development is full of unknowns which result in the high rate of project failure we see too often in industry. Reasons for a project failure will vary based on the stakeholder interviewed.

Software Project Estimation

As developers we dread when management requests a project estimate. Typically, you do not have the opportunity to understand all the requirements, the team composition is unknown, and you have been given until tomorrow end of day to produce an estimate. Several months later everyone is yelling at you about the software estimation errors encountered during the project.


Promoted to Technical Lead. Now what do I do?

You have just received the much desired promotion to Technical Team Lead The team is waiting your direction. You What should you do now?

Getting to Acceptance: Validating your requirements with FitNesse

How do you know when you are "DONE" and the assignment is complete? Well of course you are done when your requirements are complete. But it always happens that your interpretation differs from the customer/management's interpretation.