Agile Open Northwest

Diana Larsen - As a partner in FutureWorks Consulting and a specialist in the human side of software development, Diana Larsen expands teams’ capabilities to interact, self-organize, and improve project performance. She co-authored Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great (Pragmatic Programmers, 2006) with Esther Derby. Clients come to Diana because of her experience and expertise; they stick with her because of her candor, compassion and courage. She leads group processes for collaborative thinking and planning, as well as guiding teams through project retrospectives. She presents workshops, speaks and writes on self-organizing team development and team leadership, project leadership, innovation development, leading retrospectives and influencing organizational change. A former board member of the Agile Alliance, Diana works with a wide network of colleagues. She co-founded the International Retrospective Facilitators Gathering and the Agile Open Northwest 2007 conference.

Patrick Logan is a well-known Portland developer who participates in a number of local groups. He works for Liberty Mutual Agency Markets on open source software.

You can read his blog at patricklogan.blogspot.com.

Charlie Poole has spent more than 30 years as a software developer, designer, project manager, trainer and coach. After a long career in IT for a local government agency, he has managed an independent consultancy since 1995, with clients ranging from government agencies to internet startups. Through his company, PooleConsulting, he works with teams to help them adopt agile practices and with managers to help them understand how to work with agile teams.

Charlie specializes in the role of tests in agile development and regularly presents workshops on topics like Test-Driven Development and Communicating with Tests.

Charlie is the primary maintainer of the open source NUnit Test Framework, supporting cross-platform development of managed code, and the author of the NUnitLite embedded framework. He is currently working on a number of test-integration tools, including one for the Visual Studio environment.

Charlie maintains a developer-oriented web site at charliepoole.org and a blog at nunit.com/blogs. He developed and hosts the Agile Open Northwest site.

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, president of Wirfs-Brock Associates, specializes in the transfer of analysis and design expertise to organizations through training, mentoring, and consulting. Rebecca invented the set of design practices known as Responsibility-Driven Design and is an innovator in practical techniques. Her most recent book is Object Design: Roles, Responsibilities, and Collaborations (Addison-Wesley, 2003). Rebecca and her associates excel at helping teams develop solutions which support planned variations. Throughout training and consulting, Wirfs-Brock Associates employ the principles of Responsibility-Driven Design and fluidly move between details and "big picture" thinking. Rebecca's clients are energized to incrementally implement and communicate solutions to complex problems. Rebecca is the design columnist for IEEE Software and blogs at www.wirfs-brock.com/rebeccasblog.html. A former Agile Alliance board member, Rebecca is active in the Agile, OOPSLA, and Software Development Best Practices conferences.

Ward Cunningham is the Director of Committer Community Development of the Eclipse Foundation, an innovative open source collaboration among large and small commercial interests focused specifically software development. Ward co-founded the consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc., has served as an Architect in Microsoft's Patterns & Practices Group, the Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principle Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory. Ward is well known for his contributions to the developing practice of object-oriented programming, the variation called Extreme Programming, and the communities supported by his WikiWikiWeb. Ward hosts the AgileManifesto.org. He is a founder of the Hillside Group and there created the Pattern Languages of Programs conferences which continue to be held all over the world.