Carl Erickson

Carl received his MS and PhD in computer engineering in 1991 from Michigan State University, and a BS in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1985. As a faculty member at Grand Valley State University from 1991 to 2000, he taught computer science courses in networking, operating systems, architecture, and object technology. During this time, Carl was principal investigator on two National Science Foundation grants for developing operating systems and architecture laboratories.

In early 2000, seeking an opportunity to apply his teachings, Carl took a position as Vice President of Technology Development for Deltamode, a startup company based in Austin, Texas. Twelve months later, Deltamode was shuttered due to insufficient working capital, providing Carl with two life-changing lessons: (1) write software for the REAL needs of REAL people, and (2) agile practices can change the software world. Partnering with Bill Bereza, Atomic Object was born in the summer of 2001.

Carl maintains a part-time position as an industrial lecturer at Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden. In recent years he’s taught a summer course called Software Craftsmanship.

While continuing to oversee operations and client engagements, Carl dedicates a significant amount of his time toward the provision of high-level consulting services to Atomic clients, including Fiserv, World Bank, Priority Health, X-Rite, ISD Corporation, MMPC, IBM and others. Carl is a sought-after speaker and frequent publisher on the topics of technology and effective software practices.

Carl serves on the advisory boards for Grand Valley State University’s School of Computing and Information Systems and Ferris State University’s Digital Media Software Engineering program.

Making up for a youthful deficit of organized sports, Carl is now actively working to keep up with his younger employees at softball, cyclo-cross, and innebandy. He has served for six years on the board of the Swedish American Heritage Society, including as its President. Carl and his family live in East Grand Rapids.

In addition to regular contributions to Atomic Spin, Carl maintains his own blog, Great Not Big, in which he shares his ideas about building and running a successful software development company.

Selected Publications:

[See our papers for abstracts and resources]

• “Big, complex, and tested? Just say ‘when’”, David Crosby, Carl Erickson, Better Software, February 2007.
• “Presenter First: Organizing Complex GUI Applications for TDD”, Micah Alles, David Crosby, Carl Erickson, Brian Harleton, Michael Marsiglia, Greg Pattison, Curt Stienstra, Agile International Conference, Minneapolis, MN, July 2006.
• “Effective Test Driven Development for Embedded Software”, Michael J. Karlesky, William I. Bereza, Carl B. Erickson, IEEE Electro/Information Technology Conference, East Lansing, MI, May 2006.
• “Make Haste, not Waste: Automated System Testing”, Carl Erickson, Ralph Palmer, David Crosby, Michael Marsiglia, Micah Alles, Extreme Programming and Agile Methods – XP Agile Universe , Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2003
• “Extending UNIX System Logging with SHARP”, Matt Bing, Carl Erickson, 14th Systems Administration Conference (LISA 2000), USENIX, New Orleans, LA, December 2000.
• “Object Oriented Integration Testing”, Paul Jorgensen, Carl Erickson, Communications of the ACM, Volume 37, Number 9, September 1994.