Biography

Pete McBreen is the author of Software Craftsmanship and Questioning Extreme Programming. He is an independent consultant who actually enjoys writing and delivering software. Despite spending a lot of time writing, teaching and mentoring, he does hands-on coding on a live project every year. Pete specializes in finding creative solutions to problems that software developers face. After many years of working on formal and informal process improvement initiatives, he took a sideways look at the problem and realized, "Software development is meant to be fun. If it isn't, the process is wrong." Pete lives in Cochrane, Alberta, Canada and has no plans to move back to a big city.

His speciality is in assisting small teams in the development of object-oriented software. With over 24 years of experience, Pete started working with C++ in 1989 and has specialized in helping teams transition into object technology. After using C++, Java, Python and C# his preferred development language is now Ruby (with Javascript a close second). He is a course designer, teacher, and coach in object technology. Pete has delivered tutorials at TOOLS USA and OOPSLA and regularly teaches Use Case and OO Design courses.

Every year Pete works as a developer in a project team to ensure that what he talks about actually works in practice. In recent years this has included enhancing an airline's website to increase the volume of reservations made over the web, writing message oriented middleware and being the technical lead for a stock exchange workstation. These experiences have confirmed for him the value of well written use cases, test driven development and frequent releases to the user community.

Over the course of his career Pete has worked in many different mission and performance critical domains including Credit Card Authorization, Stock Exchange workstations, Airline Websites for reservations, Manufacturing Resource Planning and Job Scheduling, Personnel, Dispatch systems, Time and Attendance and Payroll Systems. In addition he has also worked on Social websites, dispatch systems, oil and gas departmental information systems and web scale statistics gathering.

Mr. McBreen has been quoted as saying "Software development is meant to be fun. If it isn't, the process is wrong." This reflects his personal philosophy that "the software development process must support the ways that people naturally work. Software systems are such a fundamental part of any corporation that the sustained ability to enhance and extend systems is what matters most. Truly incremental object oriented development processes are a means of achieving this goal."

His book, Software Craftsmanship is Pete's contribution to the ongoing debate about how to improve software development. Questioning Extreme Programming continues this exploration, but along a slightly different track.

Pete McBreen undertakes the following roles

• Process coach
• Mentor and Trainer
• Technical designer and architect
• Quality Assurance Manager
• Requirements facilitator
• Web Architect
• Developer

Contact details

Last updated: April 2010