Meet the Abakas team.
Dan Powell
Dan Powell has over ten years of startup, management, architecture, and development experience. He has spent most of his career solving large-scale data problems, using a wide variety of technology to architect and implement high-volume web and mobile systems. Past solutions include a next-generation architecture for a top-three clinical applications vendor, high-volume twitter stream processing, and a mobile training solution for global sales forces. A "renaissance developer", Dan has also worked on projects ranging from mobile games to ASP applications to build systems, while working for clients as varied as IBM, Sermo, Vertica, CloudSwitch, Careport, Mobiquity and Mustang Mobile Games.
Dan also has over 15 years of experience developing and participating in the open source and Linux communities including contributing to the development of the Linux kernel for DEC Alpha processors and the development of the Stampede Linux distribution. He studied mathematics and chemistry at North Carolina State University.
Steve Delisle
Steve has over 15 years of development and architectural leadership experience. Early in his career, he spent time working for a large analytics company leading the development of mathematical modeling software targeted at identifying and resolving network bottlenecks. Soon after, he found that he greatly preferred the excitement and challenges of the startup world, leading to the founding of Abakas nearly 7 years ago. Since then, he has worked on numerous projects and technologies ranging from flex/flash to C# to Ruby on Rails.
Steve holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Connecticut, focused on the research of Power/Long Tail Statistics and Queueing theory. He also has a BS in Mechanical Engineering and Material Sciences.
Catherine Powell
Catherine Powell has spent the last ten years working throughout engineering, including development, test, support, and product management. She focuses on agile team management and effective software delivery, building high-performance multi-functional teams that work effectively with business needs. Catherine's projects also include non-dogmatic agile training for teams just starting up or looking to move to agile methods. Past experience includes an enterprise storage system, a tablet solution for restaurants, a mobile data synchronization platform, a marketing analytics platform, and several web-based applications.
Catherine is also a speaker, author and mentor, and can be found volunteering in the Boston startup community. She holds a degree in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley.
Selected Publications and Presentations
- Publications
- Managing the Cost of "Drop Everything", Search Software Quality, February 2012
- Cloud Computing, Search Software Quality, November 2011
- Chapter: Opportunity Cost of Testing, Reducing the Cost of Testing, September 2011
- Smoothing Out Lumpy Sprints, Agile Record, March 2011
- Attracting Agile People, Search Software Quality, March 2011
- Transitioning from Waterfall to Agile (blog post), STP, December 2010
- Write Test Reports for Business Success, Search Software Quality, November 2010
- What Really Happened, Agile Record, July 2010
- STOP! Defect Leakage, Software Test & Performance Magazine, January 2010
- Presentations
- Ruby on Rails, BostonIO, January 2012
- Your Tester Personality, STPCon, October 2011
- Agile in a Waterfall World, STPCon, March 2011
- Testing in the Interview, STPCon, October 2010
- Cost of Testing (panel), STPCon, October 2010
- Twist, October 2010
- Communicating with NonTesters, CAST, October 2010
- Organizations
- STPCon Fall 2010 - Spring 2012, Conference Board
- AST, Volunteer Coordinator
- BUILD, Volunteer
- Thoughtbot Apprentice, Sponsor