Alan Atlas

Alan Atlas has been professionally involved in high tech for nearly thirty years. Starting out with a BA in Psychology from Brown University and a BSEE from the University of Massachusetts, he joined Bell Labs as a hardware engineer and promptly went off to Georgia Institute of Technology to get an MSEE. During his time at Bell Labs, he discovered software and taught himself the C programming language.

Moving to the world of software development, Alan spent some years developing kernel functions in a real-time UNIX kernel for scientific workstations and spent the next 25 years in technical management positions from Development Manager to CTO. Highlights of his career include the release of OSF Motif 1.0, AvidNews 1.0, an industry-award-winning broadcast news management system from Avid Technology, time at RealNetworks, and the release of Amazon S3.

While a Sr. Development Manager in Web Services at Amazon.com, Alan discovered Scrum. He became a Certified Scrum Master and he and his team used Scrum for over a year to successfully deliver Amazon S3, the Codie-award-winning web service that provides unlimited Internet-connected Storage.

The success of the Amazon S3 project and Alan’s enthusiasm for Scrum methodology led to widespread Scrum adoption within Amazon.com. Alan became a Certified Scrum Trainer and the first fulltime Agile Trainer/Coach at Amazon. His experiences in this capacity led him to seek and achieve the Certified Scrum Coach designation, and then to become a fulltime Agile coach at Rally Software, a market leader in Agile tools and services. Alan has given talks at Agile2009, the 2009 Munich Scrum Gathering, AgileChina2010, and Scrum Gatherings in Shanghai in 2011 and 2012. He has given certification courses in North America, Europe, and Asia, concentrating on India and China in recent years.

Currently, he is CTO of Scanbuy, Inc., the leading mobile bar code solutions company in the world. Finding ways to make Scrum work in a small, cash-challenged environment has sharpened his sense of what’s important in Scrum and what isn’t. Besides his company’s eventual success, Alan’s goal is to take Agile out of the classroom and into the streets.

Outside of work, Alan plays tenor and baritone saxophone in Motown-style soul or rock bands, scuba dives, and naps whenever possible. Tormenting the family parrots also takes up a lot of his time.