Patricia Nevitt

Patricia Nevitt

After a stint in the Air Force, Patricia started her career as a C++ and Visual Basic developer. Over time, she realized that her true strengths were problem-solving, writing and communication.

She made the switch to analysis and she never looked back. She keeps her skills fresh by eliciting technical requirements, writing database queries, and occasionally grepping a repo for some code mining.

As a business and systems analyst, she brainstormed the Million Dollar Question during a job interview (and got the offer) while explaining her approach to root cause analysis. She developed the Requirement Trifecta after a hotshot young automation engineer turned her on to gherkin. She uses these approaches to develop one-pagers with a user story showing the why, a focused diagram illustrating the who and what, and a set of gherkin features to bring it all together.

As her career progressed, she started wading into scrummastery. In her various roles as business analyst or product owner, part of the job was always team scrummaster. She runs a tight and focused daily standup and uses the sprint planning meeting to confirm the direction for the next sprint and ensure no member of the development team is overloaded. She relies on her backlog refinements to vet out story requirements, and brings it all together at the end of the sprint with a lively demo and retrospective session.

Her strongest lesson was the value of establishing trusted relationships. She has discovered that just by listening alone, she can often earn someone's trust. So often, frustrated clients and difficult co-workers just want someone to listen to what they have to offer. And she cements that trust by delivering on her commitments.

She has spent the last twenty years working on financial software in the mortgage and healthcare industries.