My Agile Credentials

In 1995 I co-founded an IT services company called Digital Focus that grew to almost 200 people by 2000. We built enterprise-class business-to-business systems using Java and Web technology, and did all of our work fixed price. We had our own performance testing lab in house, and had developed our own methodology called Value Identification and Delivery, which included an up-front envisioning session that our customers paid for. During that time I wrote Sun Microsystem's Enterprise Java textbook.

In 2000, at the suggestion of one of our architects, Jeff Nielsen, we tried eXtreme Programming (XP) on a project. It went well, and we gradually shifted all of our work to use XP. We were an early adopter of Agile, and were a major sponsor of the annual Agile conference.

I left Digital Focus in 2001 to do other things, and wrote a book about the use of Agile methods for building high-assurance systems. The book is called High-Assurance Design, and Peter Neumann wrote the foreword, and it was based on my experience at Digital Focus.

Since then I have consulted to various organizations, helping with Agile and DevOps adoption and also helping them to understand intractable systemic problems such as chronic production incidents, which always relate to processes used for development. To date, I have helped more than ten organizations to implement Agile and/or DevOps methods. I still code, and occasionally work on programming teams, in order to stay current, and so that I don't forget what it is like to be a programmer, but my main focus in my consulting is at the organization level.

In the early 2010s I had become troubled by the apparent insularity of the Agile community, and the fact that it did not seem to be benefiting from the work that many people outside the Agile community were doing in the fields of organization change and behavior. To address that, I assembled an editorial board for a website called Transition2Agile, and we collectively created the content for that site. The board consists of people from the Agile community and also from the org change and behavior communities. I feel like we contributed to thinking in the Agile profession.

In recent years I have written a large number of articles in LinkedIn about my Agile and DevOps work. Most recently, I assembled the team that created Agile 2. Today I lead Agile 2 Academy, whose mission is to help organizations to use the ideas of Agile 2.