Speakers
Amit Uttam
Amit Uttam is a Lead Consultant with ThoughtWorks, and bears the scars of legacy upgrades. He is actively engaged with several clients to manage new IT investments and system upgrades, most recently with Fortune 500 companies looking to re-invent existing, core customer-facing platforms. He has led the development and execution of successful legacy transformations in the United States, Canada, China, India and Brazil.Chad Holdorf
Chad Holdorf, Scaled Agile Coach at John Deere Intelligent Solutions Group (ISG), has orchestrated multiple, large-scale Agile rollouts at ISG affecting more then 700+ people. The first rollout included 200+ people and 30+ managers and was initiated, very successfully, just four months prior to a critical product launch. Chad has been with John Deere for 10 years in roles of developer, Program Manager and ScrumMaster. Chad is a certified ScrumMaster, Scrum Product Owner and Scrum Practitioner.Dave Sharrock
Dave Sharrock has worked in the world of IT and product development for nearly 20 years, and as a business leader, executive and entrepreneur has been continually searching for the simplest and most hands-off approach to excellence in execution. Finally discovering Scrum and other agile methods 3 years ago, Dave has lost no time in deep diving into best practices and bringing these to a number of high-profile enterprise transitions. An expert in team and enterprise agile transformations, today Dave combines a deep understanding of the challenges faced by today's business leaders and the tensions that agile methods surface. His goal is to help the enterprise understand and experience the advantages adaptive methods bring to how an organization is run.Esther Derby
Esther derby associates, inc. www.estherderby.com || +1 612 724 8114 http://www.estherderby.com/category/insights_newsletter Co-author, Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management and Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams GreatGerard Meszaros
Gerard Meszaros is an independent software development consultant and trainer with 20+ years experience in software and over a decade of experience in agile methods such as eXtreme Programming, Scrum and Lean. He has also been one of the early proponents of including User/Usage Centered Design (UxD) practices on agile projects and has applied automated unit and acceptance testing on projects ranging from full-on eXtreme Programming to traditional waterfall development in wide range of industries. He has been a frequent presenter of papers and tutorials at major conferences such as Agile 200x, OOPSLA, JAOO and SD West/Best Practices. His book xUnit Test Patterns – Refactoring Test Code was published in May 2007 by Addison Wesley in the Martin Fowler Signature Series and won a Jolt Productivity Award in the Best Technical Book category. Gerard is based in the Calgary area but has worked as far afield as Europe, China and India.Hans Schoebach
Hans works as a Consultant for Enterprise Application Integration with international clients in the manufacturing industry since 2010 after working for Galdos Systems Inc. since 2006 as Senior Software Architect. At Galdos he was responsible for the architecture and design of Galdos’ software products and product road map for Geo-spatially enabled Web Services and Infrastructures and in particular Spatial Data Infrastructure Middle-ware and Enterprise Systems. Before joining Galdos Hans worked at major international IT companies incl. NCR, Bull, Data Pathing Inc. in Germany, the US and Canada. Hans has developed large scale enterprise applications for Supply Chain Management, Manufacturing Execution Systems and real-time Shop Floor Control for the Aircraft and Automotive Industry. Hans has been the leading industry partner in international collaborative research projects headed by the Canadian National Research Counsel (NRC).Janet Gregory
Janet Gregory is the founder of DragonFire Inc., an agile quality process consultancy and training firm. Her passion is helping teams build quality systems. For the past ten years, she has worked as a coach and tester introducing agile practices into both large and small companies. Her focus is working with business users and testers to understand their role in agile projects. Janet's programming background is a definite plus when she partners with developers on her agile teams to implement innovative agile test automation solutions. Janet is a frequent speaker at agile and testing software conferences, and she is a major contributor to the North American agile testing community. For more about Janet's work, visit her websites http://www.janetgregory.ca, http://janetgregory.blogspot.com, and http://www.agiletester.ca.Jeremy Lightsmith
Jeremy spends most of his time & energy building highly performant software development teams. A seasoned agile coach, trainer & facilitator, Jeremy excels at creating environments where teams can discover how they work best. He has a deep understanding of agile, and is constantly looking for better ways to share knowledge and collaborate. As a presenter, Jeremy favors interactive and group techniques and pulls from disciplines as diverse as Theatre Improv and Montessori. Though Jeremy is now an independent consultant in Seattle, most of his 11 year career has been spent at companies like ThoughtWorks and Pivotal. During his time at ThoughtWorks, Jeremy coached teams and trained facilitators; he owes much of his toolbox to the ThoughtWorkers with whom he worked. He is currently writing a book about Facilitation Patterns.Johanna Rothman
I help you identify and solve the problems that prevent you from releasing systems, hiring the right people, deciding which project to work on next. I take a pragmatic approach: what will work best for you, now? When I work with people, first we define our goal together. Typically, it's to get a better product out the door faster. I work with my clients to help managers figure out how to do the managing better, and how the technical contributors can contribute better, not to create a by-the-book system. I work with you, your staff, and your current product development practices. Together, we learn what works well for you and what doesn't. I believe in changing only what needs to be changed at the current time, to maximize your success. We work together to develop a blueprint for the future, and to build in capacity to recognize and implement change. I've written these books:
- Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects
- Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
- Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby)
- Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds
- Corrective Action for the Software Industry, (with Denise Robitaille)
- I also have two essays in Amplifying Your Effectiveness.
Kris Read
Kris Read has studied Agile Methods since publishing an early Master’s Thesis on TDD and distributed agile at the University of Calgary over a decade ago. He has been a past speaker at XPAU and Agile conferences since 2005, and went on to moderate the Calgary Agile Methods User Group for a number of years. More recently he has co-founded the Calgary DevOps meetup group, providing a discussion forum and networking space for the DevOps community. Professionally, Kris has been successful in a number of roles from Software Developer through Enterprise Architect and Chief Technology Officer – applying Agile at each and every opportunity in companies both big and small. In 2009 Kris helped take a web start-up company live on the then-bleeding-edge Amazon Cloud infrastructure, and has since delivered talks about AWS, DevOps and Startups in front of all kinds of audiences, both business and technical. Kris is currently a Lead Consultant and Technologist with ThoughtWorks, where he evangelizes Agile, DevOps, Cloud Computing, Lean Startup Practices, and development excellence.Linda Rising
Linda Rising is an independent consultant who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. She has authored four books and numerous articles and is an internationally known presenter on topics related to patterns, retrospectives, influence strategies, agile development, and the change process. With a Ph.D. from Arizona State University in the field of object-based design metrics, Linda's background includes university teaching and software development in a number of different domains.Mary Poppendieck
Mary Poppendieck started her career as a process control programmer, moved on to manage the IT department of a manufacturing plant, and then ended up in product development, where she was both a product champion and department manager. Mary considered retirement 1998, but instead found herself managing a government software project where she first encountered the word "waterfall." When Mary compared her experience in successful software and product development to the prevailing opinions about how to manage software projects, she decided the time had come for a new paradigm. She wrote the award-winning book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit in 2003 to explain how the lean principles from manufacturing offer a better approach to software development. Over the past several years, Mary has found retirement elusive as she lectures and teaches classes with her husband Tom. Based on their on-going learning, they wrote a second book, Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash in 2006, and a third, Leading Lean Software Development: Results are Not the Point in 2009. A popular writer and speaker, Mary continues to bring fresh perspectives to the world of software development.Michael Feathers
Senior Trainer, Mentor and Consultant Michael Feathers is a senior member of Object Mentor team. He provides training, coaching and mentoring services in Agile/XP programming practices, test-driven development, refactoring, object-oriented design, Java, C#, and C++. Michael has over 12 years of experience in developing world-class software solutions. Prior to joining Object Mentor, Michael designed a proprietary programming language and compiler as well as a large multi-platform class library and a framework for instrumentation control. Michael is an active member of the Agile/XP community. As a contribution to this community, he developed and maintains the CPPUnit — an open source C++ port of the JUnit testing framework. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE. He regularly speaks at software conferences around the world and has been the acting chair for the Codefest event at the last three OOPSLA conferences. When Michael isn't engaged with a team, he spends his time investigating new ways of altering design over time in codebases. His key passion is helping teams surmount problems in large legacy code bases and connecting with what makes developing software fun and enriching.Michael Vax
Michael Vax is VP of Engineering at Partnerpedia (www.partnerpedia.com), provider of Enterprise App Store and Marketplace solutions. He spent more than 30 years in software development working as a developer, an architect, a manager, and an executive. Michael is always looking for pragmatic ways to increase productivity of software teams. As one of the organizers of Agile Vancouver, he is actively promoting the Agile process and frequently speaks at industry events and conferences.Michelle D’Souza
Michelle D’Souza is a Lead Consultant at ThoughtWorks and works as a Software developer, Iteration manager and Agile coach. She has been helping companies deliver enterprise-level software in the United States, Canada, Australia and Brazil, including helping organizations migrate from their Legacy platforms through Agile methodologies.Mike Edwards
Mike Edwards started his career 25 years ago as a software developer. In the past 10 years his career has gone down the path of managing IT, leading him to earn the PMI certifications for Project Management (PMP) in 2003 and Program Management (PgMP) in 2008. Mike is employed as the Senior Program Manager at Home Hardware. In the quest to improve software development at Home Hardware, Mike found himself suddenly immersed in the worlds of Agile, Lean and Kanban. These domains have forever changed how he thinks of IT, and Mike has started Home Hardware on a different path in how they approach the business of IT. Mike has initiated numerous improvement programs at Home Hardware including Agile and Lean software development. Although Home Hardware is only a few years into our transformation, the results have been significant with marked improvements in the value projects deliver to their customers. The journey ahead is long will never really end, but so far the department is off to a great start. In addition to leading, coaching and teaching new approaches at Home Hardware, Mike has been excited to speak at six conferences across Canada in the past year.Owen Rogers
Owen Rogers (@exortech) works at Pulse Energy, where his team has been applying Lean Startup concepts for the past 3 years. He used to work as an Agile coach and consultant with ThoughtWorks. He is a regular speaker at Agile conferences and is one of the original organizers of Agile Vancouver.Philippe Kruchten
Philippe Kruchten is professor of software engineering in the department of electrical and computer engineering of the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. He holds an NSERC Chair in Design Engineering. He joined UBC in 2004 after a 30+ year career in industry, where he worked mostly in with large software-intensive systems design, in the domains of telecommunication, defense, aerospace and transportation. Some of his experience is embodied in the Rational Unified Process (RUP) whose development he directed from 1995 till 2003, when Rational Software was bought by IBM. His current research interests still reside mostly with software architecture, and in particular architectural decisions and the decision process, as well as software engineering processes, in particular the application of agile processes in large and globally distributed teams. He teaches courses in entrepreneurship, software project management, and design.Robert Reppel
Robert Reppel is the Software Development Manager for Platform Services at Move Inc., home of http://www.realtor.com, the largest real estate site in the world by traffic volume. He has written his first commercial application more than 25 years ago. His main interest is the people side of the business: how ways of thinking, social interactions, organizational structures and processes influence the shape of software systems.Scott Bellware
Scott Bellware is a Chief Engineer at Rackspace, where he leads research and development of new automation systems for global data center operations. He's a full time designer, developer, teacher, and quality inspector on his team, as well as being responsible for architecture, performance, program, project, and product objectives, as well as methodology, process, breakthrough targets, and curriculum. Scott is the Founder of Lean Software Austin and acts as its Lead Facilitator. He is particularly guided by Dr. Deming's warning that quality can't be added to a product through testing, and Katsuaki Watanabe's counsel to "pick a friendly fight". While Scott is often found burning the midnight oil, he jumps at any chance to hit the trails on a mountain bike and sleep out under the stars.Steve Rogalsky
Steve first started experimenting with agile and lean techniques as a child. He learned the importance of ‘test first’ and the folly of ‘test last’ after starting a snow ball fight with the older kids in the neighbourhood. While playing the popular lego game of ‘zoom your vehicle towards your brother’s vehicle and see which one breaks first’, he honed his simple design, iterative development, and continous improvement skills. As a pre-teen, while playing Monopoly on the Commodore 64 with his younger brother, he discovered the value of user stories. Modifying the BASIC code, he implemented the following user story successfully: “As an [older brother], I want to [secretly add cash to my younger brother’s account], so that [he will continue playing even when he is hopelessly losing].” Today, Steve applies these childhood lessons as an agilist and team member at Protegra. He works with fellow team members and clients to apply agile principles and practices in order to build quality in, increase communication, and improve the outcome of projects. Known to experiment with new agile techniques, he is often testing out new practices on his unsuspecting team members as part of his commitment to continuous improvement. Steve is also a founder of the Winnipeg Agile Users Group, a Post-It and Sharpie junkie, green bar addict, proud Protegran, speaker, dad and husband. twitter: @srogalsky blog: http://winnipegagilist.blogspot.com linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/steverogalskyTodd Little
Todd Little is a Sr. Development Manager for Landmark Graphics Corp. For over 30 years he has been involved in almost all aspects of software development with a focus on commercial software applications for oil and gas exploration and production. He has been on the Board of Directors for the Agile Alliance since 2004. In 2003, he co-founded the Agile Development Conference, and served as the General Chair for ADC2004, Agile2005 and Agile2006. He returned for the 10 year anniversary of the Agile Manifesto to be the General Chair of Agile2011. He is a co-author of the Declaration of Interdependence for Agile Project Leadership (www.pmdoi.org) and a founding member and past President of the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN). Along with Pollyanna Pixton, Niel Nickolaisen, and Kent McDonald, he is a co-author of the book “Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility,” Addison Wesley Todd is a well known speaker and writer on several software engineering topics including business value, uncertainty, complexity and leadership.
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