Jeff McKenna has been working in software development for over 45 years and has been actively participating in the creation and delivery of agile software development since 1987. He has been involved in all areas of software product development from system design, architecture, programming, testing, sales and marketing, and has held positions as mentor, product owner, scrum master, agile coach, evangelist, project manager, speaker, consultant and gadfly. He is especially interested in empowering teams of developers that utilize the latest tools and techniques to produce awesome results in a timely manner.
Since the late 1980s, Jeff has focused on the process side of development and along with Jeff Sutherland and John Scumniotales at Easel Corp, and in 1993 created the Scrum methodology of agile software development and started the very first Scrum team.
Jeff has worked extensively with object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications and was the Chair of OOPSLA in 1994 which 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 U.S. Air Force, Jeff has provided expertise in architecture, design and implementation for Smalltalk based object-oriented projects.
As an Architect at Rational Software (now IBM), Jeff 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. Jeff also worked with industry pioneers, including Grady Booch, to extend the Rational Rose product to natively support Design Patterns.
Jeff is a Certified Scrum Coach and Scrum Master. He has 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.
Most recently, Jeff was the Agile evangelist for Serena Software helping to build Serena Agile On Demand and worked with customers and partners aiding the adoption of agile methods and practices in engineering organizations. He also spearheaded a corporate-wide Quality Initiative.
With Senex Rex, Jeff offers Scrum training, coaching and mentoring in all aspects of XP, Scrum and Lean methods.