Brian Button

Brian Button is the Technical Director for Software, responsible for the Connected Buildings and Environmental Monitoring product lines for Emerson. It is his great pleasure to teach Agile, lean, and kanban concepts to his teams around the world, while delivering well engineered IoT and cloud solutions critical to the safety of food and medicine supplies globally. Prior to that, Brian began his career 30 years ago as a hardcore C/C++ dev on SunOS, building and delivering solutions in many languages and operating systems. He has worked in embedded systems, navigation software, mission control applications for NASA, and other interesting areas during his career. Eventually moving into Agile consulting and coaching, Brian traveled the Western world helping organizations learn better ways of developing software. He was instrumental in introducing Agile and Extreme Programming to St. Louis and has been an active leader in the Agile and Extreme Programming conferences and community in the US since the early 2000s.

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Agile’s strength lies in its adaptability and efficiency, yet a crucial principle gets overshadowed – minimalism. Minimalism extends beyond a reduction in size or scope. I…
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Dear Agile Enthusiasts, Are you fully tapping into the wealth of resources Agile Alliance offers? As part of our dynamic community, you might be receiving our informative n…
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If you implement Scrum ceremonies, you are technically doing Scrum, but are you embracing an Agile philosophy? Is your team engaged in productive work valued by the stakeholde…
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A common question in the world of membership organizations is, “What’s the value proposition for becoming a member?” In other words, why should anyone invest to join and activ…
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Objectives and key results, OKRs for short, are in vogue all over the world. And while they can certainly be valuable, unfortunately, bad, decontextualized, and inappropriate …
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Scrum masters are continuously looking for anti-patterns to help guide their team back onto the path of agility. But what if the anti-pattern originates from themselves? That’…
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Profiles in Agility, courage, resilience and humility I am in awe of Agile2022–the world’s largest gathering of Agilists and all things Agile, which Agile Alliance hosted the …
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Hello, my name is Greg, and I’m a serial hobbyist. I’m looking forward to being your guide for Hobby Hall, a new element at this year’s Agile2022 conference in Nashville. Bri…
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Happy Pride Month! I’m proud to be a member of this global and inclusive Agile community--a thriving and diverse community of over 72,000 people who help people realize their …
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On my travels, I’ve been able to spend time with penguins—both northern rockhopper penguins and African black-footed penguins. They’re adorable. They’re cute, intelligent, and…
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We’ve made some big changes to the program for Agile2022. Our conference chair Kevin Stevens breaks it all down and shares why this year’s conference will be different than in…
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If you’re interested in Business Agility, here are some upcoming things that you will want to keep an eye out for: A special report on Business Agility in the Times on March 2…
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Growing a Global Community for Learning and Impact “Ahas” are beautiful moments because of the learning within them. The pandemic exposed the elephant in the room here at Agil…
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I saw the following note about the Agile Alliance posted on LinkedIn by Ray Arell. For 20 years, the Agile Alliance has been a critical resource for people and companies to b…
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Are you concerned that your team might have strayed from the foundational principles of Scrum or deviated from its core practices? What are the warning signs and what can you …
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As more people become interested in Lean ideas and their application to knowledge work and project management, it’s helpful to find ways that make it easier to get started or …
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Simon Sinek is well-known as a writer and commentator on Inspirational Leadership. In this article, we look at how Sinek's ideas can be applied to Agile and Scrum and look at …
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The mission of Agile Alliance for many years now has been to "create a global and inclusive community." It’s been almost 2 years since I took the stage during Agile2019 at Agi…
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Scrum has been around since the mid-eighties, so why is it that some companies make it work so beautifully while others end up in such chaos that they run back to old methods?…
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https://vimeo.com/546578265 In this podcast, Howard Sublett and I chat about how Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance are working together this year to create a one-of-a-kind ex…
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I can’t juggle. But this post isn’t about me. Instead, let me introduce our latest curated experience report author and Scrum Master juggler Iurii Ialtanskii. In his report, …
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Q1 2021 has been a busy quarter for the Agile in Color initiative with Agile Alliance. After spending the last six months of 2020 coming together following Agile Alliance's Gr…
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I had the great pleasure of interviewing Natalia Lehmann, an Argentine software developer who has been working for Grupo Esfera for more than a decade. Natalia is passionate a…
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https://vimeo.com/508887532 In this interview I had the opportunity to talk with Erich Bühler, an Uruguayan by birth who moved to Spain many years ago and from there has b…
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If you’ve been to an Agile20XX event before, you know it’s an amazing conference where people from all over the world come together to discuss the latest in all things Agile —…
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Wondering how Agile Alliance conference gets the most innovative, thought-provoking, and noteworthy sessions? Our reviewers find them among the hundreds of submissions we rece…
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In this interview I had the pleasure of meeting again with Paulo Caroli, an old friend from the Agile Latam community. Paulo is a consultant who has been working for Th…
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The Agile Alliance community was deeply saddened to learn that Tamsen Mitchell passed away on October 28, 2020. A gifted coach and visual facilitator, Tamsen was a cherishe…
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I had the great pleasure to interview Thomas Wallet, an old friend with whom I reunited after many years. Thomas works at Kleer, a company that helps organizations in Argen…
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I am moved that Agile Alliance invested numerous hours providing space for this conversation. That members and subscribers showed up over and over from all over the world to p…
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I had the great pleasure of interviewing Sandro Mancuso, one of the most prominent representatives of the Software Craftsmanship community. Sandro is the author of “The Sof…
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A few weeks ago, I stood in the alley talking to my neighbor about the coronavirus situation (from an appropriate distance). "It can't get worse," he said. “It can always g…
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Our sincere thanks goes out to the Agile2020 Conference Chair, Program Committee, Track Chairs, Reviewers, Speakers, Sponsors, Volunteer Coordinators, Purple Shirt Volunteers,…
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This week I had the great pleasure of interviewing Jorge Silva from Argentina. Jorge, together with three other partners, founded 10Pines more than a decade ago. It is a softw…
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Continuando con la serie de entrevista con personajes de la agilidad esta semana tuve el placer de entrevistar a Carlos Iglesias quien desde Barcelona-España habló acerca de B…
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What happens when you can’t hold a physical conference event? Conference organizers put in incredible amounts of work to invite speakers, review submissions, shape a program, …
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This entry was written as part of the Supporting Agile Adoption program, an Agile Alliance initiative dedicated to supporting organizations and their people to become more Agi…
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Things are not what they used to be. Many are now working remotely for the first time in their lives – away from those they are used to being with five days a week. One of …
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In March, the World Health Organization officially declared the novel coronavirus COVID-19 a pandemic. This global health crisis presents vast unique challenges that have impa…
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Many people are now accustomed to working from their home office. I myself am mostly staying at home, avoiding face-to-face interaction with colleagues and friends, especia…
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A few weeks back, a good friend Elizabeth Hendrickson tweeted about her approach to learning as being quite non-linear. Like her, this has been my approach to problem-solving,…
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Around this time last year, I tweeted, “XP is not dead; it’s just not where you left it.” I was tired of hearing longtime XP practitioners complaining about the decline (or ev…
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It is unclear when the phrase “stop admiring the problem” came into my leadership tool kit, but I have been using it to improve my personal and business life for about two dec…
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One of the twelve principles behind the Agile Manifesto says: “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior acc…
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Sustainable development has always been in the Agile Principles, and, though this was mainly focused on creating a consistent pace of value delivery by not pushing humans too …
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I am a strong believer that sound organizational models are the key to a company's success and its viability in the complex world in which it must survive. The key to any v…
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One of our internal customers had been having a lot of problems scaling how they work. We work very closely with this team and heard about their pain in our regular meetings, …
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I started out speaking in the developer community a few (cough cough) years ago and then within the test community, and through those I met great people who were very active a…
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EventStorming is a collaborative workshop technique with roots in the Domain-Driven Design Community. At an EventStorming session, which typically lasts an entire day, busines…
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One toxic team member, left unchecked, can lead to low morale, and low productivity, or can even destroy an Agile team. Imagine this was your Agile team: Your Product Owner…
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I often run into teams that like big User Stories. Why spend time writing, planning, and estimating a bunch of small stories when you can write, plan, and estimate just one bi…
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XP 2019 is a great place to expand your knowledge about Agile development. It is a good space to learn, no matter whether you are a novice, an experienced professional, a tran…
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This is part of a series of posts where I take a look at some commonly asked questions and provide my spin on them.  The answers are all my own. So while my answers do not nec…
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I recently received a question about the basic qualities Agile teams should have via the website. I replied with a Reader’s Digest version to the requester and promised a more…
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At Agile2018, I had a conversation with experience report authors David Grabel and David Reichert. I met with them along with Serena Godfrey (who the report was about) and som…
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At Agile2018, I had a conversation with Nienke Alma about her experiences as a member of a POCLAC leadership team at ING. POCLAC stands for Product Owner, Chapter Lead, and A…
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"Never happen…" "Can't be done…" "Too controversial…" These were the comments an Agile team received when they floated an idea for a national Agile initiative to transform …
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That's something that David Hussman said to me a few years ago. He loved jamming with people on new ideas, and I had the honor of being in a number of those conversations with…
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Being connected to society is an essential ingredient to long-term profitability. If a company is not giving back to society, it is likely to be viewed as untrustworthy and di…
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I recently had a conversation with Sal Freudenberg and Matt Wynne about their experiences remote mobbing. I met Sal and Matt at XP 2018 in Porto, Portugal where they presented…
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There are so many conferences in the Agile space. The deliver:Agile 2018 conference was specifically created to give practitioners a place to talk about the technical details,…
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With great sadness, we learned of Mike Beedle's tragic death on March 23, 2018. Mike's positive influence and impact on the Agile community has been significant. He played …
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Avraham Poupko’s experience report, “Soup or Salad” – Models of Diversity, really got me thinking. Perhaps we are thinking too narrowly about the kinds of diversity we need to…
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Late last year we asked our individual and corporate members for some feedback on their Agile Alliance membership. We received a lot of great information, and also remember…
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I am very excited for the reboot of the Agile Coaching Network (ACN) live event and podcast, and I am equally happy that we are now part of a great member-supported nonprofit …
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I had the pleasure of helping organise the Agile Tauranga 2017 conference held in….wait for it, Tauranga at the end of September. Agile Tauranga was an Agile Alliance initiati…
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So. Full disclosure: I’m a speaker in the DevOps track giving a talk for DevOps n00bs and curious but shy people who want to learn more. You can imagine how, coming from this …
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Agile is a broad field with great variety in practitioners. Individuals and interactions are at the heart of our work. The Agile Alliance initiative Women in Agile aims to sup…
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Our latest experience report, Partnering to Improve Usability, shares the story of how Krystina Edwards became a better product owner after putting aside some preconceived not…
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So you’re attending Agile2017, right? Did you realize this makes you a member of the Agile Alliance? You have joined the ranks of an active community and the Agile Alliance Bo…
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Perusing the schedule for Agile2017, my eyes fell upon a familiar name of an old friend who I hadn’t seen at the big Agile conference before. I was so excited that we will be …
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Walking from session to session at an Agile Alliance conference, you’ll see a cluster of tables covered in sticky notes & markers surrounded by chairs and flip charts. Wha…
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If you’ve been to an Agile Alliance conference, you may have noticed a crew of people wearing deep purple shirts scurrying about with great purpose and camaraderie. These are …
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Remember when Agile was just about team practices, back when XP first started (or maybe we are just young and you just read about it in a history book!)? Regardless, the new a…
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Now that the Agile movement has expanded to larger organizations in more industries, we’re seeing a lot of variation. Granted, we’re used to a variety of frameworks, technique…
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The Agile Manifesto was created 15 years ago. Since then, Agile has undergone a substantial evolution. Early on, the organizations that just got it, did it. Then as more peopl…
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Abstract Change has changed. The amount of information and speed of information flow have outpaced our organizations’ abilities to filter and make sense of available facts and…
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What is this game about? Reducing technical debt is important. So why doesn’t everyone do it? What happens in the game? In this game, you’re a software development team worki…
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Statistics show that in 2014, more than two-thirds (68.5%) of U.S. workers are NOT enthusiastic and committed to their work. If you work 5 days a week, 40 hours a week, most o…
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I am the conference chair for the Agile2016 conference to be held July 25-29 in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s my privilege to lead the team of highly respected Agile experts and prac…
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I’m writing this as I fly home from the Agile2015 conference, or what Jake Calabrese rightfully calls “summer camp.”  I headed into the week planning …
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Why don’t Agile and management get along? In a January poll of some 400 people working in many different firms where the practices known as Agile and Scrum are being implement…
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In our latest experience report, Jorge Silva tells how he learned to eliminate the gap between pre-sales and engineering. Where he had worked previously, there wasn’t much tru…
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Our latest experience report is by Robert “Jason” Kerney from Hunter Industries. Jason joined the mob programming team at Hunter over a year ago. I met Jason last year at Agil…
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In our latest experience report, Tearing Down the Walls, Stephanie Savoia asks us to, "Imagine a wall. Now imagine a developer creating code and throwing it over...[where] it …
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The Conference Archive is a small application, written in Ruby, running on "the Cloud". I hope people attending Agile2012 check it out often after the conference is over, and …
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The lack of interest, the disdain for history is what makes computing not-quite-a-field. — Alan Kay, inventor of Smalltalk, in a recent interview One of my motivations for st…
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Welcome to the Agile Alliance's Archivist's blog. The Agile Alliance website was created in early 2001 in the wake of the now famous Snowbird meeting and writing of the Agile…

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