Hello everyone, Paul Hammond here again, Conference Chair for the Agile2015 Conference.
Let me ask you a question. Have you ever wanted to sit down with an Agile luminary and just talk? Ask them the questions you’ve always wanted to ask? Get their advice, ask their opinion, or share your own experiences?
Yes? Me too!
In fact, many people have felt the same. It was this collective desire which led to the creation of the Stalwarts track at the Agile20XX Conference.
“Your questions drive the Stalwarts sessions.”
Stalwarts bridges the gap between introductory and advanced sessions. It focuses on specific, real-time questions, challenges, and dilemmas. It thrives on the issues that attendees bring to the conference.
We invite experienced agile and lean practitioners to a focused conversation with you. These are folks who have been in the trenches for many years. They wrote the books and maintained useful blogs. They created the methods and approaches, and coached the coaches.
There will be no prepared slides or talks. Instead, there will be spontaneous dialogue with you about your real challenges
and questions. We’ll do so in an open fishbowl format.
We’ve got ten fantastic sessions planned for Agile2015. I am excited to be able to reveal our Agile2015 Conference
Stalwarts.
Dean Leffingwell
Widely recognized as a leading authority on software development, Dean Leffingwell is an author, serial entrepreneur, and software development methodologist. He is the creator of the Scaled Agile Framework, and author of five books on software development. His most recent books Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise, and Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises, form much of the basis of modern thinking on Lean-Agile software development principles and practices. Founder of several successful startups, including Requisite, Inc., makers of RequisitePro (acquired by Rational), Mr. Leffingwell also served as Chief Methodologist to Rally Software, and prior to that, as a Sr. Vice President at Rational Software (now part of IBM). He currently serves as Chief Methodologist and CEO at Scaled Agile, Inc., which he co-founded in 2011.
Linda Rising
Linda Rising is an independent consultant who lives near Nashville, Tennessee. Linda has a Ph.D. from Arizona State University in the area of object-based design metrics. She is an internationally known presenter on topics related to agile development, patterns, retrospectives, the change process, and the connection between the latest neuroscience and software development. Linda is the author of numerous articles and has published several books: Design Patterns in Communications, The Pattern Almanac 2000, A Patterns Handbook, and with co-author Mary Lynn Manns, Fearless Change: Patterns for introducing new ideas and just released in 2015–More Fearless Change. Her web site: www.lindarising.org
Jeff Sutherland
Jeff Sutherland started the first Scrum team in 1993 and formalized the Scrum process with Ken Schwaber in 1995. As CEO, CTO, or VP of Engineering he has evolved Scrum in 11 of his own companies and co-authored the Agile Manifesto in 2001. Currently, as CEO of Scruminc.com he leads agile transformations worldwide while serving as Senior Advisor to Open View Venture Partners with almost a billion dollars invested in dozens of Scrum companies. The goal is to more than double investment returns using Scrum. See Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.
Jim Benson
A pioneer in applying Lean and Kanban to knowledge work, and an internationally recognized speaker and author, Jim Benson is CEO of the collaborative management consultancy Modus Cooperandi and founding partner of Modus Institute. He is a fellow in the Lean Systems Society and recipient of the Brickell Key Award for Excellence in Lean Thinking. He is the creator of Personal Kanban and co-author of Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life, winner of the Shingo Research and Publication Award. His other books include Why Plans Fail, Why Limit WIP, and Beyond Agile.
Luke Hohmann
Luke Hohmann is the Founder and CEO of Conteneo, Inc. Grounded in the science of play, Conteneo’s enterprise software platforms and professional services merge serious games, data analytics, domain expertise and collaboration to help enterprises optimize decision making in areas of strategy, innovation, sales, product development and market research. Conteneo’s games include Innovation Games®, Knowsy® and Strategy Engine. Luke is co-founder of Every Voice Engaged Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that helps citizens and governments tackle technical and wicked social problems. He’s also written four books with long titles and has served on the Board of the Agile Alliance.
Jeff Patton
Jeff Patton helps companies adopt a way of working that’s focused on building great products, not just building stuff faster. Jeff blends a mixture of Agile thinking, Lean and Lean Startup Thinking, and UX Design and Design Thinking to end up with a holistic product-centric way of working. Jeff is author of the bestselling O’Reilly book User Story Mapping which describes a simple holistic approach to using stories in Agile development without losing sight of the big picture. You can learn more about Jeff at: jpattonassociates.com.
Elisabeth Hendrickson
Elisabeth Hendrickson, better known as testobsessed, has been kicking around the software industry for a couple decades in a variety of roles including tester, developer, and agile enabler. Author of Explore It! from Pragmatic Bookshelf, she is also known for her Google Tech Talk on Agile Testing and popular Test Heuristics Cheatsheet. She won the prestigious Gordon Pask Award from the Agile Alliance in 2010. In 2012 after more than a decade as an independent consultant, she joined Pivotal, the company where she first learned extreme programming. She is now a senior director of engineering.
Ahmed Sidky
Ahmed Sidky, Ph.D. (also know as Dr. Agile because of his doctorate in Agile) is the Director of Development Management at Riot Games where he leads a team of 60 internal agile coaches. Ahmed also serves as President of the International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile.com) – a methodology-agnostic accreditation and certification body helping deepen people’s agile competencies. Throughout his career, Ahmed has led a number of Fortune 100 companies through large-scale agile transformations using his culture-led transformation approach, which focuses on changing and introducing organizational habits critical to sustaining agility. He is the co-author of “Becoming Agile in an Imperfect World”, and is a seasoned speaker who has made several keynote appearances worldwide.
Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson
Ron Jeffries is one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, coached the first Extreme Programming team and is a Certified Scrum Trainer. He is the owner/operator of two of Agile’s most prolific web sites, RonJeffries.com and XProgramming.com. His most recent book is The Nature of Software Development, released early in 2015. He is an outspoken supporter of technical improvement and excellence in Agile Software Development. Despite his sometimes gruff demeanor he is often thought to be a teddy bear at heart. We can neither confirm nor deny this belief.
Chet Hendrickson has been involved with Agile Software Development since 1996, when as a member of Chrysler’s C3 project he helped develop Extreme Programming. In 2000, Ron Jeffries, Ann Anderson, and Chet wrote Extreme Programming Installed. It detailed XP’s core practices, how to do them, and how they work together to help teams be successful. Since 2002, Chet has been an independent consultant, coach, and trainer. In 2009, he was asked by the Scrum Alliance to help develop the Certified Scrum Developer program. Chet and Ron Jeffries taught the first CSD course and continue to offer them in the United States and Europe. He has been a Certified Scrum Trainer since 2009.
Craig Larman and Bas Vodde
Craig Larman, named one of the top 20 Agile influencers of all time, is the co-creator of LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum). Since 2005 he has worked with clients to apply the LeSS framework for scaling lean thinking and agile development to large, multisite, and offshore development. Craig is the author of several books, most recently Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS and the popular Agile & Iterative Development: A Manager’s Guide. He is one of the first Certified Scrum Trainers and Practicing ScrumMasters, starting in the 1990s while at Chevron Research. Other clients include Xerox, Ericsson, JP Morgan, Cisco-Tandberg, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Alcatel-Lucent, UBS, bwin.party, Nokia Networks, Siemens Networks, and Ion Trading. Craig also served as chief scientist at Valtech and, while living in Bengaluru India at Valtech’s development centre, helped to create agile offshore development with LeSS.
Bas Vodde is the creator of Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), a framework for scaling agile development. He authored Scaling Agile and Lean Development, Practices for Scaling Agile and Lean Development and the upcoming Large-Scale Scrum books. Bas led the Agile adoption in Nokia Networks and is involved with Agile adoptions in several large banks. He is the director of The LeSS Company and founder of Odd-e, an Agile software development, coaching, and training company in Asia. He is also the maintainer of the CppUTest C++ unit test framework and the Osaka Mac GUI automation library.
