About Kirk

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I’m an industry analyst at Burton Group. For 15 years, I worked in the trenches on real software projects. I believe software development is an amazing profession. I take a keen interest in design, architecture, application development platforms, agile development, and the IT industry in general, especially as it relates to software development. I also enjoy experimenting with new technology, whether it be the the cool new framework or tethering my smartphone to my Mac via Bluetooth to get an internet connection.

In 2002, I wrote the book Java Design: Objects, UML, and Process, published by Addison-Wesley. I have also written numerous whitepapers and articles, including The Agile Developer column for The Agile Journal. I am also the founder of Extensible Java, a growing resource of component design pattern heuristics for Java that can easily be applied to most other platforms, including .Net. I created the open source utilities JarAnalyzer and AssAnalyzer which help teams manage the dependencies between Java .jar files and .Net assemblies, respectively. I have trained thousands of software professionals, teaching courses on UML, Java J2EE technology, object-oriented development, component based development, software architecture, and software process. I am trapped in a software developer’s body, and to this day I continue to enjoy hacking in a variety of languages, including Java, .Net, Ruby, and PHP. I believe:

• source code is the most important artifact a software team produces
• software teams must guard this source code as closely as possible with a robust test suite, automated build, continuous refactoring, and a source control system
• a simple approach utilizing simple tools solves most problems
• agile does scale, is always good, and is a critical success factor for large teams
• design and architecture must, above all else, emphasize managing dependencies

Feel free to contact me via e-mail (remove the _filter).