Daniel J. Wellman

Tech Lead

Dan has been developing software using Agile practices since 2000, and started coaching in 2006, when he joined Cyrus Innovation. Since then he has worked on and led several high-profile projects. At a recent Cyrus coaching engagement for Skarven Enterprises, Dan was a member of a blended team of client and Cyrus developers writing a suite of automated tests for a web application. He guided the client's developers to isolate the web front-end layer from two dependent back-end systems. Dan knew that this would make the tests more predictable and manageable, and that the developers' experience of building the tests would lead them to truly understand the mechanics.

"It's easy to tell someone about principles but much harder to teach the mechanics," says Dan. "Most people learn better by doing, which also enables them to apply what they've learned independently."

Prior to joining Cyrus, Dan was Software Engineer, Assistant Vice President for U.S. Trust, where he trained developers in Test-Driven Development, was a developer for a portfolio reporting tool, and lead architect and developer on an account review management system. Previously he was a consultant and staff developer for numerous companies, gaining experience in Extreme Programming, team management, Java, database management, Spring, Hibernate, MySQL, JUnit and others.

Dan earned a BS, Computer Engineering, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of a two-part series of articles entitled "Google Web Toolkit" (part 1, "Your Shortcut to Ajax Web Applications"; part 2, "Writing Ajax Applications Test First") published in Better Software: StickyMinds.com. Another article is in the works on how to start writing automated tests for existing applications. He blogs at http://blog.danielwellman.com.

Contact Dan at: dwellman@cyrusinnovation.com