Speakers

Andrew Glover is the President of Stelligent Incorporated, which helps companies address software quality with effective developer testing strategies and continuous integration techniques that enable teams to monitor code quality early and often.

Andrew was the founder of Vanward Technologies, which was acquired by JNetDirect in 2005. He is the co-author of Addison Wesley's "Continuous Integration", Manning's "Groovy in Action" and "Java Testing Patterns". He is an author for multiple online publications including IBM's developerWorks and Oreilly's ONJava and ONLamp portals. He actively blogs about software quality at thediscoblog.com and testearly.com.

Bob is the president of Electroglide Inc., a Washington DC based
consulting and training company specializing in Agile Software
Development, Training and Agile Transitions. He began using Agile Methods
in 1999 and has never looked back. Project sizes range from two people to
working with clients that have over 110 developers on two major projects
in 5 development locations. Regardless of scale his goal is always the
same: deliver high quality software using Agile Methods and make the
people on the teams happier and more effective.

As the host of the Agile Toolkit Podcast, he has brought the voices of
agile experts and practicioners to the masses. He is a dynamic speaker
and the chair of the Live Aid Stage at Agile 2008 in Toronto.


Contact Me:
Bob Payne
Electroglide Inc.
323 7th St Washington DC, 20002
bob (at) electroglide.biz
202-903-6854

Chris D'Agostino is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Near Infinity Corporation. Chris formed Near Infinity in 2002 with the goal of establishing a place where engineers could focus on solving some of industry's most challenging problems. Chris' vision for Near Infinity is to build a company that truly changes the way its clients build software, and he believes that Near Infinity employees represent some of the best minds in the industry. As CEO, Chris oversees daily operations and sets the strategic direction of the company. He is a firm believer in leading by example, and is committed to leveraging technology to help run an efficient, fun, and friendly company.

Chris has over 20 years of technical experience in the industry. He began his career with TRW as a Systems Engineer working on government contracts for the Department of Defense and the Department of State. Chris held several technical leadership positions and focused on local and wide area network (LAN/WAN) design and implementation. In 1998, he began developing C and Java applications for a small technology company in Washington, D.C.

Chris holds both a B.S. and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech. He has served as an adjunct professor for the University of Virginia and taught courses in server-side Java.

David Bock is a Principal Consultant at CodeSherpas, a company he founded in 2007. Mr. Bock is also the President of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group, the Editor of O'Reilly's OnJava.com website, and a frequent speaker on technology in venues such as the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposiums.

In January 2006, Mr. Bock was honored by being awarded the title of Java Champion by a panel of esteemed leaders in the Java Community in a program sponsored by Sun. There are approximately 100 active Java Champions worldwide.

David has also served on several JCP panels, including the Specification of the Java 6 Platform and the upcoming Java Module System.

In addition to his public speaking and training activities, Mr. Bock actively consults as a software engineer, project manager, and team mentor for commercial and government clients.

David has been creating software for more than 15 years in a variety of domains: digital audio, digital biometrics, medical, financial, retail, legal, and education to name a few. For the past 8 years, David has mentored and coached agile teams in the U.S., Canada, Europe, India, Egypt, Russia, and Ukraine. Along with presenting and leading workshops / tutorials at conferences in the U.S. and Europe, David has contributed to several books (Managing Agile Projects and Agile in the Large), and worked on agile curriculum for The University of Minnesota and Capella University. David is currently writing a book for the Pragmatic Programmer series.

David leads DevJam, a Minneapolis based company composed of agile collaborators. As mentors and practitioners, DevJam focuses on using agile to help people and companies improve their software production skills. DevJam provides seasoned leaders that strive to pragmatically match technology, people, and processes in a way which produces software that makes people happier and more productive.

For more information, check out the DevJam website www.devjam.com

Esther Derby is one of the rare breed of consultant who blends the technical issues, and the managerial issues with the people issues. She is well known for her work in helping teams grow to new levels of productivity.

Management coaching, Scrum implementation, retrospectives, and project assessments are four of Esther?s key practices that serve as effective tools to start team transformation.

Recognized as one of the world?s leaders in retrospective facilitation, she often receives requests to work with struggling teams. Esther also coaches technical people who are making the transition to management and is a Certified Scrum Master.

Jared Richardson, co-author of Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful
Software Projects, is a speaker and agile coach at 6th Sense Analytics. Jared has been in the industry for more than fifteen years as a consultant, developer, tester, and manager.

Until recently he was an independent consultant focused helping teams build better software. He's now bringing that same focus to 6th Sense Analytics and their clients, using both the 6th Sense toolset and his unique experience. Jared can be found online at Agile Artisans and the Sixth Sense Analytics blog.

Jeff is the Chief Technology Officer at Near Infinity corporation, an enterprise software development, training, and consulting-services company based in Reston, Virginia. He has spent the past eight years leading Agile-focused development teams and creating web-based systems and applications. The majority of his programming experience lies in Java and Groovy/Grails, with Objective-C and Ruby/Rails being a personal spare-time learning pursuit.

Jeff holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Penn State University, and an M.S. in Systems Engineering from Virginia Tech. He is also an associate professor at the University of Virginia where he has taught graduate courses in server-side Java.

Johanna Rothman helps managers solve problems and seize opportunities.

She consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. She enables managers, teams, and organizations to become more effective by applying her pragmatic and actionable pproaches to the issues of project management, risk management, and people management.

Johanna publishes The Pragmatic Manager, a monthly email newsletter, and writes two blogs: Managing Product Development and Hiring Technical People. She is the author of several books:
- 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: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People
- Corrective Action for the Software Industry (with Denise Robitaille).

Johanna is also a host and session leader at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness Conference. Read more of Johanna's articles and her blogs at jrothman.com.

John Carnell is the manager of Platform Engineering for Thrivent Financial, a Fortune 500 financial services company. In addition, John is a prolific speaker and writer. He has spoken at national conferences, such as Internet Expo, the Data Warehousing Institute, and numerous No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposiums.

John has authored, coauthored, and been a technical reviewer for a number of technical books and industry publications. His latest book, Pro Apache Struts with Ajax, was published in late 2006.

Ken Sipe is a Technology Director with Perficient, Inc. (PRFT), IBM's largest service partner, where he leads multiple teams in the development of solutions in the SOA, Web 2.0 and portal domains, on both the Java and .Net platforms.

Ken was the founder of CodeMentor, where he was the Chief Architect and Mentor, leading clients in the execution of RUP and Agile methodologies in the delivery of software solutions. He is a former trainer for Rational in OOAD and RUP, and a CORBA Visibroker trainer for Borland. He continues to enjoy providing training and mentoring in all aspects of software development.

Ken has a deep need to be highly diversified. Ken often works with IT executives on high-level strategic roadmaps, currently geared around service oriented architectures (SOA). Ken also likes to keep his hands "dirty" in the code, which has him on a regular basis, pairing or otherwise producing code. Ken is regularly requested by clients that know him to "rescue" projects, either through the streamlining of processes or the rapid production of code.

Ken is a certified JBoss developer and is a frequent participates on open source projects. Ken is currently interested in the growing maturity of SOA solutions in the open source space, such as the ESB solutions like ServiceMix and Mule, or rules engines such as JBossRules.

Kirk is an industry analyst at Burton Group. For 15 years, he has worked in the trenches on real software projects. He takes a keen interest in design, architecture, application development platforms, agile development, and the IT industry in general, especially as it relates to software development.

In 2002, Kirk wrote the book Java Design: Objects, UML, and Process, published by Addison-Wesley. He has also written numerous whitepapers and articles, including The Agile Developer column for The Agile Journal. Kirk is the founder of Extensible Java, a growing resource of component design pattern heuristics for Java that can easily be applied to most other platforms, including .Net. Kirk has trained thousands of software professionals, teaching courses on UML, Java J2EE technology, object-oriented development, component based development, software architecture, and software process. He enjoys hacking in a variety of languages, including Java, .Net, Ruby, and PHP.

Mark Johnson is currently Director of Consulting at CGI where he is exploring software development management approaches to leverage offshore and local development resources to deliver high quality applications on-time and budget in a highly competitive environment.

Mark Johnson has over 20 years of software development experience in industries including Healthcare, state government, and strategic sourcing. Mark most recently has spent the last 2 years working with Commonwealth of Massachusets EOHHS to develop the NewMMIS application. The NewMMIS application makes use of J2EE, Portal, and Web Services technologies designed to modernize the existing Medicaid processing. In addition, Mark is active in the software community as the President of the New England Java Users Group. When not working, Mark can be found riding his mountain bike on local trails and playing with his family.

Matthew Bass is an independent software developer, entrepreneur, speaker, and writer. He has over ten years of experience across a diverse set of technologies and has worked at places like SAS Institute, the world's largest privately held software company. An agilist from the very beginning, he continues evangelizing and experimenting with pair programming, test-first and behavior-driven development, and continuous integration. Matthew has spoken at several regional and national software conferences and regularly writes for publications like InfoQ.

Michael strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers across the country. He shares his passion and energy for improvement with everyone he meets, sometimes even with their permission. Michael has spent the better part of 20 years learning what it means to be a professional programmer who cares about art, quality, and craft. He's always ready to spend time with other developers who are fully engaged and devoted to their work--the "wide awake" developers. On the flip side, he cannot abide apathy or wasted potential.

Michael has been a professional programmer and architect for nearly 20 years. During that time, he has delivered running systems to the U. S. Government, the military, banking, finance, agriculture, and retail industries. More often than not, Michael has lived with the systems he built. This experience with the real world of operations changed his views about software architecture and development forever.

He worked through the birth and infancy of a Tier 1 retail site and has often served as "roving troubleshooter" for other online businesses. These experiences give him a unique perspective on building software for high performance and high reliability in the face of an actively hostile environment.

Most recently, Michael wrote "Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software", a book that realizes many of his thoughts about building software that does more than just pass QA, it survives the real world. Michael previously wrote numerous articles and editorials, spoke at Comdex, and co-authored one of the early Java books.

Neal Ford is an Application Architect for ThoughtWorks. He is an architect, designer, and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, and video/DVD presentations. Neal is also the author of Developing with Delphi: Object-Oriented Techniques (Prentice Hall PTR, 1996), JBuilder 3 Unleashed (SAMS Publishing, 1999), and Art of Java Web Development (Manning, 2003). His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Object Pascal, C++, and C. Neal’s primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 30 developers’ conferences worldwide.

Ryan Shriver is a Managing Consultant with Dominion Digital, a Virginia-based Business & Technology Consulting firm where he's a leader in their Agile practice (dominiondigital.com/agile). He helps organizations and teams transition to Agile ways of thinking about solving problems, ranging from new product lines to operational performance improvements. Ryan's solutions typically use some combination of people, process and technology to deliver measurable results.

With a deep background in software architecture and enterprise Java, Ryan understands the challenges and issues facing development teams to deliver predictable results. His approach to getting senior leaders to define measurable objectives and priorities for their organizations, projects and development teams helps bring focus to the highest priority initiatives. Using agile methods like Scrum, Ryan helps teams iteratively deliver value quickly to the business...often in a matter of weeks.

Ryan's experiences with diverse companies and teams are the basis for his presentations on Agile subjects.

Sanjiv Augustine is the President of LitheSpeed, an Agile consulting, development and training firm, a co-founder and advisory board member of the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN), the author of several publications and the book Managing Agile Projects (Prentice Hall 2005); and the founder and moderator of the Yahoo! Agile Project Management discussion group. He presents regularly at several agile conferences worldwide, and project management conferences including Project World and Project Summit. Sanjiv has assisted clients in deploying agile and lean methodologies at many institutions large and small. As a management coach and consultant, he has advised executives in the enterprise rollout and adoption of Agile at several Fortune 250 companies. As an in-the-trenches practitioner, he has personally managed Agile projects varying in size from five to over one hundred people and coached numerous project teams. For more information, see http://www.lithespeed.com or Sanjiv’s website: http://www.sanjivaugustine.com.

Scott Davis is an internationally recognized author and speaker. He is passionate about open source solutions and agile development. He has worked on a variety of Java platforms, from J2EE to J2SE to J2ME (sometimes all on the same project).

Scott's books include Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java, GIS for Web Developers: Adding Where to Your Web Applications, The Google Maps API, and JBoss At Work.

Scott is the Editor in Chief of aboutGroovy.com, a news and information website that tracks the latest developments in Groovy and Grails. He also writes a regular column for IBM DeveloperWorks -- Mastering Grails.

Scott is a frequent presenter at national conferences (such as No Fluff, Just Stuff) and local user groups. He was the president of the Denver Java Users Group in 2003 when it was voted one of the top-ten JUGs in North America. After a quick move north, he is currently active in the leadership of the Boulder Java Users Group. Keep up with him at http://www.davisworld.org.

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks frequently at international conferences and user groups. He is author of ".NET Gotchas" (O'Reilly), coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer" (Pragmatic Bookshelf), and author of "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" (Pragmatic Bookshelf).