Jeff Atwood

Jeff Atwood lives near Berkeley, CA, with his wife, two cats, and far more computers than he cares to mention. His popular blog, Coding Horror, has always been about putting helpful information out into the world. These days he is devoting a lot of time and effort into Stack Overflow, a free Q&A site for developers—another way of getting helpful information out there.

Kent Beck

Kent Beck consistently challenges software engineering dogma, promoting ideas like patterns, test-driven development, and Extreme Programming. Currently affiliated with Three Rivers Institute, he is the author of several well known Addison-Wesley books, including Test-Driven Development. Kent was one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto in 2001. Beck has pioneered software design patterns, the rediscovery of test-driven development, as well as the commercial application of Smalltalk. Along with Erich Gamma, he created the JUnit unit testing framework. Kent Beck has an M.S. degree in computer science from the University of Oregon.

Stacia Broderick

Stacia Broderick has worked as a project manager for 14 years in commercial manufacturing and software development. Stacia was fortunate enough to be cast in the role of ScrumMaster in 2003, and ever since then has helped teams all over the world embrace the principles of and transition to agile. Stacia founded her company, AgileEvolution, Inc., based on the belief that Agile practices present a humane, logical way for teams and companies to deliver products. Stacia is a Certified ScrumTrainer and Practitioner and a PMP, a mix that proves helpful when assisting organizations' transition from traditional to modern practices. Stacia is co-author with Michele Sliger of The Software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility.

Paul Duvall

Paul Duvall is an independent consultant who helps clients create one-click deployments. He has worked in virtually every role on software projects: developer, project manager, architect and tester. He's been a featured speaker at many leading software conferences. He is the principal author of the 2008 Jolt Award-winning Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk. He contributed to the UML 2 Toolkit (Wiley, 2003), authors a series for IBM developerWorks called Automation for the People and authored a chapter in the No Fluff Just Stuff Anthology: The 2007 Edition (Pragmatic Programmers, 2007). He is passionate about automating software development and release processes.

Amr Elssamadisy

Amr Elssamadisy is a software development practitioner who works with his clients to build better, more valuable software. He and his colleagues at Gemba Systems help both small and large development teams learn new technologies, adopt and adapt appropriate Agile development practices, and focus their efforts to maximize the value they bring to their organizations. Amr's technical background and experience in C/C++, Java/J2EE, and .NET allows him to appreciate the problems of development teams and offer them support. He is the author of Agile Adoption Patterns: A Roadmap to Organizational Success.

Eric Evans

Eric Evans is the author of Domain-Driven Design, based on years of experience modeling and designing large business systems. These days, Eric focuses on making projects more valuable and agile by effective use of design. He believes that a software project should be a voyage of discovery that a team of software experts, domain experts and business strategists all take together.

Neal Ford

Neal Ford is software architect and meme wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, courseware, video/DVD presentations, and author and/or editor of five books spanning a variety of technologies. He focuses on designing and building of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, speaking at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks.

Ben Gertzfield

Ben Gertzfield is the lead developer of VMware Fusion for Mac, the popular virtualization solution for Mac OS X. As senior member of technical staff at VMware in Palo Alto, Ben is a champion of testable design, internationalization, and cross-platform development. Ben graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a degree in computer science, and subsequently lived and worked in Japan before coming back to the States. He owes much of the remainder of his learning to the Open Source world, where he contributed many of his formative years to the Debian GNU/Linux project as a package maintainer and software developer.

Justin Gordon

Justin Gordon pioneered the use of Test Driven Development, JUnit, and other Agile development techniques. Justin founded the open source project, the Dependent Object Framework, which vastly simplifies and accelerates JUnit testing with persistent dependencies. Justin has been passionately writing software for 22 years, focusing on Java for the past 10 years at several startups. Justin graduated in 1991 with an AB magna cum laude in applied mathematics from Harvard and received an MBA from UC Berkeley in 2001.

Janet Gregory

Janet Gregory is the co-author of the upcoming book, Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams (Addison-Wesley, 2009). Based in Calgary, she specializes in helping teams build quality systems, and her greatest passion is promoting Agile quality processes. Over the past 10 years, she has helped to introduce development Agile practices into companies as tester or coach, and has successfully transitioned several traditional test teams into the Agile world. Her focus is working with the business users and testers to understand their role in Agile projects, but she has partnered with developers on her Agile teams to implement successful test automation solutions. Janet is a frequent speaker at Agile and testing software conferences in North America including Agile 2008, PNSQC, StarWest and StarEast conferences. She's a major contributor to the North American Agile testing community.

Matt Heusser

After spending 10 years developing, testing, and managing on software projects, Matt Heusser is currently a member of the technical staff at Socialtext, in its QA group. In addition to his work at Socialtext, Matt is a part-time computer science instructor at Calvin College, a columnist for Software Test & Performance Magazine, and the lead organizer for the Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference and Workshop on Technical Debt.

Joshua Kerievsky

Joshua Kerievsky is the author of the best-selling, Jolt Award-winning book Refactoring to Patterns and creator of innovative eLearning albums on a variety of topics. Joshua has over 20 years of experience in software development and loves coaching Agile project communities, helping executives understand and manage technical debt, leading workshops, and building software products (because it enables him to "walk the Agile talk" as an entrepreneur, manager, customer and programmer).

Dean Leffingwell

Dean Leffingwell is a consultant, entrepreneur, executive and technical author who provides product strategy and enterprise-level agility coaching to large software enterprises. From 2006-2007, he was founder and CEO of consumer marketing identity company ProQuo, Inc. Dean has also served as chief methodologist to Rally Software, and was co-founder and CEO of Requisite, Inc., makers of RequisitePro for requirements management. Dean has been a student, coach and author of contemporary software engineering and software development management practices throughout his career. He is the author of Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises.

Bob Martin

Bob Martin has been software professional since 1970. He has published dozens of articles in various trade journals. He is a principal in Object Mentor, a consulting providing software services to the global community. Today, he is one of the software industry's leading authorities on Agile software development and is a regular speaker at international conferences and trade shows. His books include Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship and Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices. He is a former editor of the C++ Report and currently writes a monthly Craftsman column for Software Development magazine.

Gerard Meszaros

Gerard Meszaros is an independent consultant specializing in Agile development methods. Gerard started his career in software development at Nortel’s R&D subsidiary in 1981 as a software developer and later development manager, project manager and software architect. He built his first unit testing framework in 1996 and ran his first eXtreme Programming project in early 2000. He is an expert in agile methodologies, test automation patterns, refactoring of software and tests, and design for testability. Gerard has applied automated unit and acceptance testing on projects ranging from full-on eXtreme Programming to traditional waterfall development. His book xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code was published by Addison Wesley in May 2007 as part of the Martin Fowler Signature series and recently won a Jolt Productivity Award in the Best Technical Book category.

Aaron Mulder

Aaron Mulder is the chief technical officer of Chariot Solutions, where he helps companies with their Java, Java EE, Rails, and Open Source architecture challenges. When not consulting, you can usually find him presenting at conferences and user groups, wrangling with JCP spec committees, working on his latest book, or hacking away at Apache Geronimo, ActiveMQ, OpenEJB, and many more. Along the way, he has contributed to many other projects including, JBoss and PostgreSQL.

Sean Parent

Sean Parent is a principal scientist and engineering manager for Adobe's Software Technology Lab, a small research group improving how Adobe develops software through new technologies and education. Sean has been at Adobe since 1993 when he joined as a senior engineer working on Photoshop. From 1988 through 1993 Sean worked at Apple, where he was part of the system software team that developed the technologies allowing Apple's successful transition to the PowerPC RISC processor.

Rebecca Parsons

Dr. Rebecca Parsons is ThoughtWorks' chief technology officer. She has more than 20 years' application development experience, in industries ranging from telecommunications to emergent internet services. She has extensive experience leading in the creation of large-scale distributed object applications and the integration of disparate systems. Before coming to ThoughtWorks she worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida where she taught courses in compilers, program optimization, distributed computation, programming languages, theory of computation, machine learning and computational biology. Rebecca received a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Economics from Bradley University, a Master's of Science in Computer Science from Rice University, and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University.

Pollyanna Pixton

Pollyanna Pixton considers herself an international collaborative leadership expert as a result of her 38 years of working inside and consulting with corporations and organizations, to help companies create workplaces where talent and innovation are unleashed. Pollyanna is a founding partner of Accelinnova, president of Evolutionary Systems, and director of the Institute for Collaborative Leadership. She speaks and writes on topics of collaborative leadership and business ethics and is co-author of the forthcoming book, Stand Back and Deliver: A Leader's Guide to Business Agility. Her education includes a master's degree in computer science, three years of graduate studies in theoretical physics, and a bachelor's degree in mathematics.

Jean Tabaka

Jean Tabaka, lead Agile coach with Rally Software, specializes in coaching and mentoring organizations adopting Agile principles and practices. With a passion around collaboration practices through facilitation techniques, she guides teams, divisions, and entire organizations in creating and supporting hyper-performing teams. In addition to her work on collaboration, Jean has developed an approach with Ryan Martens of Rally for enterprise-level maturing and scaling of Agile practices based on the Lean principles of Flow, Pull, and Innovate. A speaker at conferences worldwide, Jean is the author of Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders. She holds a Master of Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University.