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Carl Jones

Mr Carl Jones

Senior Lecturer

School of Computer Science and Informatics

Email
JonesC162@cardiff.ac.uk
Telephone
+44 29206 88797
Campuses
Abacws, Room 4.12, Senghennydd Road, Cathays, Cardiff, CF24 4AG

Overview

I’m Carl Jones, a senior lecturer at the National Software Academy (NSA) at Cardiff University.

I am currently the Deputy Director of Learning and Teaching for Undergraduate Programmes in the school.

Prior to joining the NSA in 2015, I worked for BT for 23 years, and my goal is to integrate my industrial experience into my teaching.

I’m married to Clare, and we have two grown-up children, Nia and Luc.

I follow Cardiff Rugby, Tottenham Hotspur and Glamorgan County Cricket Club, so I clearly crave disappointment!

Research

While not an active and publishing researcher, my main areas of personal development are in agile development approaches and combining them with modern architectural approaches.

In scholarship, I'm interested in the assessment of teamwork and in the development of individual behaviours to generate good team work.

Teaching

My teaching interests are based on my industrial experience.  Currently, I lead on Software Development Skills (2) in the 1st year, with a focus on software design & testing, requirements decomposition, agile thinking and source control best practice.

In the 2nd year, I teach Commercial Applications with Java, using the Spring Boot framework as an example of a large framework that supplies boiler-plate code for the building of applications.  I challenge the students to see the larger patterns in the framework and to reflect on the value and costs of using frameworks.

Biography

I became Deputy Director of Learning & Teaching for Undergraduate programmes in 2022, having previously been Chair of the Taught Programme Operations Team (TPOT) since 2016. I am also the Chair of the Board of Studies for Undergraduate Programmes.

I joined the NSA in 2015 and have presented our innovative teaching style at international agile development conferences (XP 2018, XP2019) as well as co-authoring a number of papers. I am a member of the school's scholarship group and have sat on colleage-wide sub-groups looking at ways of improving teaching.

From 1992 to 2015, I worked for BT. During this time, I was a developer, a software architect, a (reluctant) project manager and an agile coach. I worked on a number of different systems both internal and external and both large and small including the NHS NPfIT programme, the BusinessLink.gov programme, MyDonate and bt.com.  My technical background has been mainly in Enterprise Java systems and my recent objectives have been to increase agility in project delivery within a large programme of work.

I was also been responsible for welcoming and mentoring a number of graduate entrants into BT so I left with a good feel for what academia produces and the uplift that industry provides.

From 1986 to 1992, I studied at Cardiff University, obtaining a BSc in Computer Science and a MPhil in software development methodologies.

Honours and awards

Winner - Most Uplifting Member of Staff - ESLA Awards 2018

Professional memberships

  • MBCS
  • FHEA