Jennifer Greene studied philosophy in college but, like everyone else in the field, couldn’t find a job doing it. Luckily, she’s a great software tester, so she started out doing it at an online service, and that’s the first time she really got a good sense of what project management was.
She moved to New York in 1998 to test software at a financial software company. She managed a team of testers at a really cool startup that did artificial intelligence and natural language processing.
Since then, she’s managed large teams of programmers, testers, designers, architects, and other engineers on lots of projects, and she’s done a whole bunch of procurement management (you’ll learn all about procurement in Chapter 12!).
She loves traveling, watching Bollywood movies, drinking carloads of carbonated beverages, and owning a whippet.
Note
Jenny and Andrew have been managing projects and writing about project management together since they first met in 1998. Their first book, Applied Software Project Management, was published by O’Reilly in 2005 and received widespread praise from both working project managers and academic researchers.
Note
They followed up with the first edition of Head First PMP in 2007, Head First C# in 2008, and Beautiful Teams in 2009. Andrew and Jenny regularly contribute to the project management body of knowledge, writing articles, presenting at conferences, and giving back to the project management community any time they have the opportunity to do so.
Andrew Stellman, despite being raised a New Yorker, has lived in Pittsburgh twice. The first time was when he graduated from Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, and then again when he and Jenny were starting their consulting business and writing their first project management book for O’Reilly.
When he moved back to his hometown, his first job after college was as a programmer at EMI-Capitol Records—which actually made sense, since he went to LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and the Performing Arts to study cello and jazz bass guitar. He and Jenny first worked together at that same financial software company, where he was managing a team of programmers. He’s since managed various teams of software engineers, requirements analysts, and led process improvement efforts.
Andrew keeps himself busy eating an enormous amount of string cheese and Middle Eastern desserts, playing music (but video games even more), studying taiji and aikido, having a girlfriend named Lisa, and owning a pomeranian.