"The Big Park Bench" Event
Meet and Interact - Monday, August 8, 2011, 5:30 - 7:00 pm
A Celebratory Reception on opening night where attendees will meet the authors including a Q&A session where questions will be fielded from the audience.

The "Park Bench" within Open Jam
Conversations - All Week Long - August 8-12
A casual, comfortable setting to share ideas, ask questions, challenge perspectives, and grow new possibilities. The original authors will be stopping by the "Park Bench" throughout the week-long conference to make themselves available to attendees. Come, share, ask, interact, learn and create.

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

Mike Beedle www.enterprisescrum.com

"Scrum is an implementation of a Lean Development process that will help all business processes that are innovative, knowledge-intensive, creative, and collaborative. Agile Software Development as a whole is cross-fertilizing Lean Development. It is much more than a 'software development' style -- it is the incubator of Lean Development techniques. Lean is a revolution that will affect every process in every company -- it is The Machine that Changed the World."

About Mike
Mike Beedle is an entrepreneur that has successfully applied Scrum and Agile within his companies (New Governance, Quant Traders). He is a co-author of the Agile Manifesto, and the first Scrum book: Agile Software Development with Scrum. Mike has introduced Scrum and Agile to thousands of people at hundreds of companies around the world, and is authoring a new book: Enterprise Scrum. He holds a Ph. D. in theoretical Physics.

Arie van Bennekum www.3a-mc.nl

Arie has the strong idea that the human interaction is fundament for every succes, agile or other ways. This is the driving force behind his specialisation in workshop facilitation (he is linked to the IAF (www.iaf-world.org), Certified Professional Facilitator and Assessor CPF). Dogma’s are excluded in his approach except for one.

“Communication is where it starts….and where it ends”.

About Arie
Arie started developing in 1987 and moved to project management (RAD-methodology) in 1994. He has been agile ever since. He specialised in project management and facilitation. In 1997 he switched from RAD to DSDM (Atern) as his fundament and has been change and project manager and coach for many projects and facilitator in hundreds of sessions. Arie has been very involved in the DSDM Consortium. Via this link he participated in the creation of the Agile Manifesto, februari 2001.

Dr. Alistair Cockburn Alistair.Cockburn.us

"We have finally matured. What we now produce are Reflective Improvement Frameworks, not methodologies (though we often still say that out of habit). Crystal, Scrum, Kapital-K Kanban are examples. Each contains a few rules, not enough to run a project, but enough for people to improve their situation better than merely inspecting and adapting. Old-style Big-M Methodologies are gone. And that's good."

About Alistair
Dr. Alistair Cockburn was voted one of the "The All-Time Top 150 i-Technology Heroes" in 2007, for his pioneering work in understanding use cases and for co-creating the agile software development movement. He is an internationally renowned IT strategist, expert on agile development, use cases, process design, project management, and object-oriented design, author of the Crystal agile methodologies, three Jolt-awarded books on software development, co-author of the Agile Manifesto and the project management Declaration of Interdependence. He is well known for his lively presentations and interactive workshops.

Ward Cunningham c2.com

"Expect to be surprised and delighted in your interactions with both people and machines every day. Unexplained absence of delight is a smell that deserves investigation. Don't hesitate to look at yourself or the givens in the space around you. People like to be delighted. If the problem were simple it would have fixed itself already."

About Ward
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 continues to be held all over the word.

Martin Fowler martinfowler.com

"When we wrote the manifesto, much of the software world considered the agile way of working to be unprofessional. I'm pleased to see that change, clients now accept our approach and want to learn. There are still frustrations: there's a lot of pseudo-agile around and true understanding is spreading more slowly than we'd like. We are in the early iterations and should be happy with progress so far."

About Martin
I'm an author, speaker, consultant and general loud-mouth on software development. I concentrate on designing enterprise software - looking at what makes a good design and what practices are needed to come up with good design. I've been a pioneer of various topics around object-oriented technology and agile methods, and written several books including "Refactoring", "UML Distilled", and "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture". For the last decade I've worked at ThoughtWorks, a really rather good system delivery and consulting firm, and I write at martinfowler.com.

James W. Grenning www.jamesgrenning.com

"Are you still manually testing your code? That’s unsustainable! Software is fragile; any change can have unintended consequences. The implication is that a full retest is needed with every change. Do you have an ever growing workforce to retest your code? Of course not. What you have is an ever increasing untested code gap; it’s a safe place for the bugs to hide."

About James
James Grenning teaches, and coaches worldwide. He feels very fortunate to have participated in the Agile Manifesto’s creation. At the end of the last millennium, James saw that extreme programming could really help embedded developers. His mission was born; to bring high-quality practices to embedded systems developers. The ink is barely dry on James book, Test-Driven Development for Embedded C.

Jim Highsmith www.jimhighsmith.com

"Ten years of Agile methods have had a positive impact as we’ve learned to deliver value to customers faster, enhanced quality programs, and improved work place satisfaction. However, there are always improvements to be made and I see four key ways: continue to innovate, balance idealism and practicality, reinvigorate our Agile value roots, and unify rather than splinter."

About Jim
Jim Highsmith is an executive consultant at ThoughtWorks, Inc. He has experience in both development and management roles. He is the author of Agile Project Management; Adaptive Software Development, and Agile Software Development Ecosystems. Jim is a founding member of The Agile Alliance and the Agile Leadership Network. He has worked with companies worldwide and spoken at many Agile conferences.

Andy Hunt pragprog.com

"You can never completely define agile, or its practices, because they are constantly evolving to meet specific needs in specific circumstances. Agile should be ever-shifting, ever-changing, ever-responding to change in context. You need to keep thinking, keep adjusting.  If you're going through your project without thinking about what you’re doing, then you aren’t thinking. Time to start."

About Andy
Andy Hunt is a programmer turned consultant, author and publisher.  He co-authored the best-selling book The Pragmatic Programmer and six others, including Pragmatic Thinking & Learning, and co-founded the Pragmatic Bookshelf, publishing award-winning and critically acclaimed books for software developers.  Andy dabbles at composing and performing progressive rock and jazz, and woodworking.

Ron Jeffries www.XProgramming.com

"Yes, people, we really meant what we said! The idea was to see the value of Agile, embrace the ideas, and build up your skill to do it well. Many people have done that: that's great. Many others have dipped their toes into Agile, gained a little benefit, and gone no further. That saddens me because they won't taste the joy of doing it well, and because it holds the industry back. Get with it!"

About Ron
Ron Jeffries has been developing software longer than most of you have been alive. He is surely the oldest signatory of the Manifesto, and unquestionably the best looking. Ron is famous for his prolific posting on Agile forums, and for his gentle and modest demeanor, endearing him to his readers everywhere. His sense of humor tends toward sarcasm and irony, especially in biographies.

Jon Kern technicaldebt.com

"You don't DO agile, you ARE agile."

About Jon
From aero engineering beginnings, Jon was soon immersed in OO and app dev. Appalled at the waste in traditional 80s/90s big process, Jon developed light-weight, cost-effective approaches. From real-time, military, C-based flight simulators; to TogetherSoft startup & mentoring, to Ruby-based health care & pre-incident apps of today, Jon is passionate about providing effective solutions and teams. Twitter: twitter.com/JonKernPA.

Brian Marick exampler.com/

About Brian
Brian Marick was a programmer, tester, and team lead in the 80's, a testing consultant in the 90's, and is an Agile consultant this decade. He is one of the authors of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and is a past chair of the board of the Agile Alliance. Brian is the author of two books, The Craft of Software Testing (1994) andEveryday Scripting with Ruby (2007). The second is actually pretty good. He is a frequent invited speaker at conferences, including at Better Software 2004; Agile 2005; Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference 2005; and Software Process Advancement, XP Day Toronto, and OOPSLA (all in 2007).

Robert C. Martin objectmentor.com

About Robert
Robert C. Martin has been a software professional since 1970. In the last 35 years, he has worked in various capacities on literally hundreds of software projects. He has authored "landmark" books on Agile Programming, Extreme Programming, UML, Object-Oriented Programming, and C++ Programming. 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. He is a former editor of the C++ Report and currently writes a monthly Craftsman column for Software Development magazine. Mr. Martin is the founder, CEO, and president of Object Mentor Incorporated.

Stephen J. Mellor StephenMellor@StephenMellor.com

1. Code does not document the path not taken.
2. Derived requirements require more abstraction, less customer collaboration.
3. Executable models are 'software', and to be constructed, tested and collaborated on in the
same way as code."

About Stephen
Stephen J Mellor is an independent teacher and consultant focused on methods for the construction of real-time and embedded systems. He is the author of Structured Development for Real-Time Systems (way back in 1985), Object Lifecycles, Executable UML, and MDA Distilled. He was Chief Scientist of the Embedded Software Division at Mentor Graphics, and founder of Project Technology, Inc., before its acquisition. He participates in multiple UML/modeling related activities at the Object Management Group, and has served on OMG's Architecture Board. Mr. Mellor was the Chairman of the Advisory Board to IEEE Software for ten years. He is also adjunct professor at the Australian National University in Canberra, ACT, Australia.

Ken Schwaber www.scrum.org

"The Agile movement is started. Started is the right word. Although many have benefitted, the degree of improvement made is still miniscule. We are faced with the daunting challenge of undoing the legacy of waterfall. Our customers are still learning to trust us so that they can be agile. We are still having trouble building completed, done increments within an iteration. Anyone who wants to know technical debt only has to look at the cultural and professional debt the software development profession incurred during the dark ages of waterfall."

About Ken
Ken has been a software developer for over thirty years. He has filled all positions, from bottle-washer, to cook, to owner of the restaurant. He was heavily involved in the waterfall process until he had to use it himself, starting in 1990. At that point, he and Jeff Sutherland developed the Scrum process, which he has been using and helping others use ever since. Ken signed the Agile Manifesto, started the Agile Alliance, Scrum Alliance, and now Scrum.org. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Jeff Sutherland scrum.jeffsutherland.com

About Jeff
Jeff Sutherland is the inventor of Scrum, used in 74% of Agile software companies in 91 countries.  In 2006, Sutherland established his own company, Scrum, Inc., regarded as the premier source of Scrum Training in the world. He is Chair of the Scrum Foundation, and Senior Advisor and Agile Coach to Openview Venture Partners. His next goal is to replace traditional project management with Agile processes worldwide. Over the years, Jeff has served as VP of Engineering and CTO or CEO of eleven software companies, has achieved Top Gun fighter pilot status in the U.S. Air Force, and co-founded of the Center for Vitamins and Cancer Research. He holds an M.S. from Stanford, and a doctorate from the U. of Colorado Med. School.