Speakers and Workshop Leaders

Rachel Davies

Inspect and Adapt with Agile Retrospectives and Open Space Facilitator

Rachel Davies is author of "Agile Coaching" book and UK's leading expert in coaching agile teams. She is a internationally recognized and presents at many industry conferences. Rachel has over 20 years experience in software development in a variety of roles from software developer to manager. She has been an agile practitioner since 2000 and utilizes a range of agile methods including XP, SCRUM, Lean/Kanban, and DSDM. She has extensive experience facilitating agile meetings and workshops.

Jens Korte

ScrumFluenca

Jens Korte has over 14 years experience in software development, business analysis and project management. For the last 5 years he has worked as a consultant for the implementation of agile practices with Microsofts Team Foundation Server in enterprise environments (Investment Banking, Healthcare). His special focus is onto process improvement and learning organization.

Maria Diaconu and Alexandru Bolboacă

Software as a craft - an intro to Software Craftsmanship movement

Maria is founder and coordinator of the Romanian Agile community Agile Works Romania and owner of Mosaic Works, a company offering coaching and training services in software development area. From Software Developer to Agile Practitioner & Coach, Maria is supporting quality software, software craftsmanship and people passionate about their craft. In the last 5 years she is working with teams to achieve high quality software and increase their productivity. She is also an active promoter of the Software Craftsmanship movement in Romania.
Alexandru worked in software development for more than 10 years, both locally and abroad. He is currently a Software development consultant and trainer working in partnership with Mosaic Works, helping customers develop high quality software and working to improve the quality of the software developed in Romania. He studied in the recent years the influence of human factor in software development and continues to work to find ways to improve the software quality. He is an active promoter of the Software Craftsmanship movement in Romania.

Zuzana Sochova

Company Culture as the Key Agile Milestone

Zuzana is a co-founder of Agile Consortium Czech Republic and has daily experiences with agile and SCRUM for more than 5 years.

She has spoken at Agileee 2009 (Kiev), WebExpo 2008, 2009 (Prague), delivered consultancy and workshop on agile methods, and has been a guest lecturer at the Czech Technical University and Charles University in Prague.

Her articles on Agile and Scrum methods have been published in Business World and ICT revue.

Pawel Lipinski

Being an agile nearshore team

Paweł is a software architect and a consultant of enterprise software. Since 1999 he has been working in the design, development, and auditing of projects in a multitude of fields like banking, insurance, telecommunication, and media. He is an agile coach and a strong believer in the value of quality in software. Paweł is an owner of Pragmatists, a Warsaw-based company focused on creating high quality software using agile methods.

Thomas Sundberg

Clean Code – is it worth the time and money to write your code so it is trivial to understand and maintain?

Thomas Sundberg is a consultant at Agical AB in Stockholm, Sweden. He has a Masters degree in Computer Science from the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, in Stockholm. He has been working as a Java developer the last ten years. His first experience with test driven development was with JUnit the autumn of 2000. He has also worked as a lecturer at KTH teaching programming courses. There he realized that students who solve programming assignments in pairs normally produce better solutions compared to students working alone. Thomas has a passion for automation and has set up and maintained Continuous Integration systems since 2004 at different companies, including a large Swedish-Japanese mobile phone manufacturer.

Robert Dempsey

Distributed Agile in a Multicultural World

Prior to starting Atlantic Dominion Solutions, Robert worked with numerous IT consulting companies, helping clients set up enterprise networks including infrastructure, storage, and security. Before that, he obtained an MCSE, along with the A+ and N+ certifications. In 2006, Robert dove head first into Agile development, and implemented Agile into every part of Atlantic Dominion Solutions, including sales, marketing, and operations, in addition to development and design. Today, Robert helps teams and companies make the transition to Agile with Agile training and consulting. Robert Dempsey holds an MBA from the Crummer Graduate School of Business, and a BA in Computer Science from Rollins College.

Mack Adams

The invisible Agile Coach

Mr. Adams has over 10 years of experience in IT software, services and consulting in a range of delivery and management roles. He has worked with agile since 2002 in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, India and is currently an agile coach in Paris. His focus is helping shape organizations to align their business strategy and delivery approach. He recently presented at Agile 2009 in Chicago, USA & AgileTours in Paris, FR.

Pierluigi Pugliese

Solution Focused Agile Coaching

Pierluigi Pugliese started hacking code so long ago that he cannot remember exactly when anymore. He worked many years in the mobile telecommunication business, both as programmer and as a team leader, providing software for several mobile phones of known brands.
Currently he works as a consultant for software organisations and coach for individuals and teams, focusing on software development and software processes, helping them implementing sound and agile solutions.
Pierluigi is based in Munich, Germany.

Monika Konieczny

Coping with communication problems in agile projects

Monika Konieczny is a project manager at Empathy Interactive with a graduate degree in computer science. She is currently a PhD student at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.
Her research involves investigations into the use of simulation games in project management.

Petra Skapa

Iteration Management - unclogging your development process

Petra Skapa is a leading practitioner of agile transformation programs, with broad international experience helping companies transition to an agile model. She has worked as a developer, iteration manager, project manager, coach, and Chief Agilist with companies ranging from Fortune 100 to boutique consultancies, across numerous industries. She has over 8 years experience with Agile.

Gwyn Morfey and Laurie Young

The Sword And Other Tales - In this fast-moving and varied presentation, Gwyn and Laurie condense over a year's worth of retrospectives into one hour of shiny stress-tested new practices.

Gwyn is a qualified lawyer, intermittent thespian and battle-scarred contractor, now engaged in full-time Agile coaching with New Bamboo in London. He's presented at Scrum Gathering, Ruby Underground, and XP Day, and has worked on Channel Five's new gadget site and Amnesty International's world-changing social network. Gwyn believes in simple solutions, rapid iterations, and making hard decisions early. In his spare time he travels the world and designs real-world games.

Laurie's background is computer science and developing. Holding a PhD from Imperial College on scheduling of tightly coupled distributed applications on complex systems. His development preference changed from Java to Ruby because of its emergent simplicity. Laurie moved from development to scrum mastering at New Bamboo, where he is currently working as Scrum Master.

Andrea Provaglio

Systemic Software Development for Agile Teams

Andrea Provaglio is an independent professional with almost twenty years of experience in the field of Information Technology. He assists clients from many different domains, which can range from large organizations such as the European Commission in Brussels, or large multinational banks, to small and dynamic IT companies.

His mission is to help his clients to develop better software and to create better development teams; and to help the individuals to improve technically and relationally.

Andrea’s contribution to his clients is primarily in the areas of: Adoption of Agile methodologies, such as Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum; Development of soft skills for teams and organizations; Coaching and training on software development for the Java/J2EE platform; Design Patterns (Integration and Distributed Applications); Design and development of Web/Enterprise applications; Architectural assessments; Skill assessments; Team building.

Andrea is frequently a speaker at international IT conferences and contributed to a few books and publications. 

Pawel Brodzinski

The Kanban Story – Ups and Downs of Implementing Kanban

Pawel Brodzinski is seasoned manager in areas software development and project management. Currently he works at VSoft where he runs a division which focuses on delivering mobile solutions to financial market. Pawel is also well-recognized blogger writing about software project management at blog.brodzinski.com. Pawel is passionate about building great teams, fixing broken projects and creating quality products.

Piotr Jagielski

Refactoring Test Code

Piotr Jagielski is a developer who uses test-driven development technique in his daily work. He currently creates applications for airline industry at Sabre Holdings in Krakow. He also gives trainings on topics related to unit testing.

Simon Roberts

Making Scrum Stick: Sustainable Scrum Transitions

Based in Berlin and Munich, Germany, Simon is an experienced Scrum Coach and Certified Scrum Trainer. He has actively applied Scrum since 2002 and lightweight/agile methods since the late 1990s. He specialises in introducing and coaching Scrum in traditional Enterprises, particularly in the financial sector, in the UK and Germany. Having had a career that ranges from hands-on software development to running VC funded companies, he enjoys working with development teams and with managers. Simon has coached and consulted with several companies where enterprise transition Scrum teams have been used to manage the roll-out of Scrum for the development of complex products.

Nowadays project managers more and more frequently choose agile methodologies while conducting sophisticated projects. It is mainly because it increases effectiveness of the team and customer satisfaction. Unfortunately as in other methodologies problems with human resources occurs quite frequently. Most of the problems are connected with (lack of!) communication.
What can be done to avoid at least some of them? How to improve communication with customer and communication between team members? Fortunately there are many possibilities. One of them is simulation game.

It is not a silver bullet... but it can really help in a difficult situation. The game enables people to look at the world through somebody else's eyes, feel as totally different person, try a completely different solution - in a safe conditions. During the game the players have to accomplish totally crazy project in an agile way. Side effects of the game - players may: die of laughter, start to like each other, want to play more often ;)

Badly written tests are a nightmare of many agile projects. Hard to understand and maintain test suite sometimes act as a brake on introducing changes. In this talk I will discuss basic techniques of refactoring test code. During live coding session I will simplify non-readable tests in few simple test. I will show, among other things, various ways of creating test data, expressing assertions and avoiding duplication in tests.
Speaker Bio: Piotr Jagielski is a developer who uses test-driven development technique in his daily work. He currently creates applications for airline industry at Sabre Holdings in Krakow. He also gives trainings on topics related to unit testing.

Being agile is not a piece of cake. Being agile when you're the 'remote site' is even harder. The presentation will cover our (Pragmatists) experiences in a project where we acted as a nearshore team: what issues we had, how we coped with problems we faced, how was the cooperation developing.

Paweł is a software architect and a consultant of enterprise software. Since 1999 he has been working in the design, development, and auditing of projects in a multitude of fields like banking, insurance, telecommunication, and media. He is an agile coach and a strong believer in the value of quality in software. Paweł is an owner of Pragmatists, a Warsaw-based company focused on creating high quality software using agile methods.

What if an Agile Coach could have a way to determine the right question to ask to intervene on an individual or a team? How valuable would this be for a such a coach?The Solution Focused methodology is widely used in psychotherapy and also in coaching. It is based on designing a solution and working out the steps needed to achieve it. This is a very elegant approach because it shifts the discussion from the emotionally-filled problem state to where the result is: the solution state. This technique can be successfully used when coaching Agile teams, for example during planning and retrospectives, but also as a reflection mechanism and coaching technique for Scrum Masters, Product Owners and the whole development team as well.

Pierluigi Pugliese started hacking code so long ago that he cannot remember exactly when anymore. He worked many years in the mobile telecommunication business, both as programmer and as a team leader, providing software for several mobile phones of known brands.

Currently he works as a consultant for software organisations and coach for individuals and teams, focusing on software development and software processes, helping them implementing sound and agile solutions.
Pierluigi is based in Munich, Germany, and operates through his company Connexxo.