Bob Johnson
Welcome to my Home Page
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Bob Johnson
Project Manager
Agorics, Inc.
300 Third Street
Los Altos, CA 94022 |
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Who am I
I wrote code, mostly in Fortran and Pascal, for many years and
for many companies. Some of the companies were large DoD places; some were small
start-up companies. About seven years ago I joined a medium-sized commercial software
company in the QA group. The company did a fine job of black box testing of their code,
but knew this wasn't enough. So I looked into additional ways to improve the quality
and time to market for the software products.
What is this Document
Software engineering and computer science are two very large fields. Both are required
to provide the new software products people read and dream about. My interests are in
the areas of software engineering, in particular the infrastructure required to succussfully
produce software products. These areas are development life cycles, defect tracking, and
metrics. In time, I plan to have this page become a pointer to this information. The
page will also point to some of my other interests: restaurants,
caving, and
The Desert.
Current Projects
Currently, I enjoy working for a small start-up company doing work with security, the
Internet, and electronic commerce. It's not fair to say working as I've always felt that if
software development ever becomes "work" I'll find another line of income. Right now I'm
playing with migrating electronic commerce code to the Netscape/
Java
environment. This involves the design and construction of a distributed object
system to control budgets within a company. These budgets can then be spent for services
provided to people within the company.
Related Information
PSL Workshop - PLS stands for Problem Solving Leadership. This
five and a half day hands-on class was designed and taught by Jerry and Dani
Weinberg. They have attracted a fine staff. While the class is applicable
to a wide number of industries requiring technical leadership, the class is
strongly slanted toward the software industry. My class had students from
Microsoft, AT&T, and ...
Development Life Cycles - For years the waterfall model has been
used to develop software. However, for many projects better models are available.
In many cases teams know that the waterfall model isn't working and invent variants
which may or may not work better. Just this week I talked with someone planning to
move their company into Rapid Application Development because it had all the right
buzz words. This person had no idea that it was, but it had to be faster and cheaper
than what they were currently doing.
Defect Tracking - I have found that the design and building of
defect tracking systems or more simply bug databases can vastly effect the
overall quality and time to market of software products. Bug databases are
usually home grown by an organization making it one of the larger pieces of
project code re-used by the organization. This code seldom receives the
attention of deliverable code, however, most engineers and many managers use
it on a daily basis.
Favorite Links
Agorics, Inc.
A PLC Builder
Bat Conservation International
Bay Area Restaurant Guide
Thank you.
E-mail: bob@agorics.com
Last updated: April 6, 1996