Biography
John Clifford is a Senior Fellow at Construx Software focusing on software development, project management, and team management practices, with an Agile emphasis. John gained his experience over the past quarter-century at small startups and at the world’s largest software company. He's held a variety of positions including software development engineer, product feature team manager, group QA manager, group project manager, and development director.
John's involvement in high tech dates from the introduction of microcomputers in the 1970s. He's written software professionally on environments spanning the computing spectrum including CP/M, Unix, VAX VMS, MVS/TSO, MacOS, Windows, and Windows CE. He's held key roles on teams developing desktop applications, mobile and embedded device applications and frameworks, asynchronous telecommunications software for microcomputers to mainframes, and tools.
John initially became interested in Agile and Scrum as a means of improving the software development process as a software development manager and later manager of division-wide project management at a publicly-traded company, even though he was fairly successful using traditional software project management techniques. The successful team and organizational transformations to Agile that he's overseen have made John an Agile enthusiast to the point of changing his career path from software development management to Agile processes and practices training and consulting. John has trained and coached dozens of companies, from small startups to several Fortune 500 companies, to use Lean, Agile, and Scrum principles and practices successfully, helping them to markedly decrease time to market while increasing quality and employee satisfaction.
John currently holds Certified Scrum Master, Certified Scrum Product Owner, and Certified Scrum Practitioner certifications from the Scrum Alliance, and is also recognized as a Lean/Kanban coach. He uses his training and experience at Construx to help clients improve their understanding and practice of the art and science of software development. Contact him for more information on how Construx can support you and your company.
In his spare time, John blogs about software development-related issues with an Agile perspective. He also runs an Agile processes and practices meetup group in the Seattle metropolitan area, with monthly meetings to discuss Agile-related topics. Meeting attendence is free, and you can learn more about the group here.