West Coast Clinic Bios.

Here're the bio's I promised.

Let's start with Rob. 

Rob Lally has successfully managed and delivered over 20 Agile projects in the last ten years.

Rob blends Agile and Lean with a pragmatic, commercial focus. He's experienced Agile from many different perspectives; having worked as a developer, architect, coach, project, programme and product manager. He's built in-house applications for a Fortune 50 company, public-facing web apps and retail products, using both distributed and co-located teams.

A technologist at heart, Rob always makes time to write code, learn new languages and stay on top of emerging technologies. Rob, formerly, worked as a Vice President at JPMorgan. He now runs his own consultancy company.

And now for Pete:

Peter Aitken has spent the last decade working as an Agile coach and developer.  During this time he has worked mostly in Java environments working on  a diverse range of applications including  DVD and Blu Ray authoring tools for Universal Studios and fund management tools for investment banks.

Peter currently works as an Agile Coach and Developer in a small team creating Ruby on Rails applications.  Peter is an expert in developer-lead acceptance testing. He created Marjoree (http://marjoree.com), a ruby gem (library) used to test-drive sybase store procedures. His current favourite toy is Cucumber (http://cukes.info/ ),  a BDD framework which teams use to describe in plain text how software should behave.

Peter is scheduled to present to AgileScotland on Cucumber over the summer.

I vouch for both of these guys.  I've learnt plenty from both of them during the years. 

And finally, me:

My name is Clarke Ching.  I teach - and do - a very simple version of Agile - one that works well for people who haven't read too many books on Agile, who really don't want to be "extreme" about anything, and who, maybe, use COBOL, or Java, or .net, or maybe don't even develop software at all.  I call it everydayAgile because it's designed to bring the benefits of agile - more projects finished, happier customers, happier developers, and so on - to everyday people who work in everyday businesses.  It's the 80/20 version of Agile where you get 80% of the benefits, with only 20% of the effort.

If you are familiar with Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (as used by manufacturers like Intel and Ford) then EverydayAgile is TOC applied to software development.  If you're not familiar with TOC then think of Lean as Toyota do it (rather than how it's described in the books) instead.

I run my own consulting business and chair the not-for-profit AgileScotland special interest group.  Between engagements and in my spare time I write.  Later this year the Pragmatic Programmers will publish my business novel Rolling Rocks Downhill which explains everydayAgile in detail.  It's just like Goldratt's The Goal, but set in corporate software development.  You can buy my first book RocksIntoGold - a business parable, like "Our Iceberg is Melting" or "The One Minute Manager", which explains why businesses should do Agile, without mentioning anything technical or even the word agile (hint: it's all about cashflow) - from amazon or you can read it at rocksintogold.com for free.

Clarke