School

I went to school in Tübingen, Germ
UC Berkeley Campanile
any. In 1992 I made my German high school diploma ("Abitur") at the Uhland Gymnasium, Tübingen, Germany. From 1989 to 1990 I spent one year in the US as an exchange student at the Guilford County High School near Greensboro, N.C., where I also obtained the American high school diploma.

In 1993 I started studying computer science at the well-known Humboldt-University of Berlin. A second stay in the US led me to the West Coast where I studied Computer Science and General Engineering at UC Berkeley from fall 1995 to spring 1996. There I discovered my interest for the topic of Artificial Intelligence, which was to become the subject of my diploma thesis.

In 1998 I participated in the second Robocup Competition in Paris, France, where our team (AT Humboldt 98) became the vice champion in the simulation league. I wrote my thesis about agent-based virtual soccer and graduated in 1998.

Recent Trainings

After having read about Extreme Programming and first experiments at my company, in 2004, a workshop on test-driven development by Dave Astels, one of the TDD thought leaders, convinced me of this Agile software construction technique.

In 2005, I was intrigued by Ken Schwaber's book "Agile Software Development" and took a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) course by the only German speaking Scrum trainer, Joseph Pelrine in Karlsruhe, Germany. This made me the first CSM in Berlin.
In 2006 I participated in the first inofficial German Scrum Master Gathering in Frankfurt.

I also participated in the Fifth Scrum Gathering in Minneapolis, MN, USA, where I used the opportunity to get four trainings: Agile Retrospectives and Agile Team Building by Esther Derby, Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn, and Scaling Scrum by Ken Schwaber.

At Valtech I set-up and participated in the company-interal agile certification program and thus obtained my Valtech Agile Mastery Certification in November 2008.

In December 2009 I obtained the Certified Scrum Practitioner (CSP) Certification from the Scrum Alliance.