Agile Alliance Announces New Board Members and Officer Appointments

The Agile Alliance, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the advancement of Agile software development principles and practices, today announced three new members have been elected to the Agile Alliance. In addition, three existing board members, Jim Newkirk, Diana Larsen and Esther Derby, have been appointed as officers of the organization.

“The Agile Alliance board of directors provides the driving force behind not only our yearly Agile conference but also is committed to advancing Agile development principles and practices,” said Phil Brock, managing director of the Agile Alliance. “We have the extreme fortune this year of having a great mix of existing leadership combined with new talent which will help advance not only our organization but the Agile software development community located throughout the world.”

The new board members will each serve a two-year term and replace Todd Little, Rachel Davies and J.B. Rainsberger. In addition, Hakan Erdogmus will serve as the conference chair for Agile 2011, scheduled for Aug. 7-13, 2011 in Salt Lake City, Utah.

To help guide the organization’s growth the Agile Alliance membership elected three new board members and selected Jim Newkirk as Chair of the Agile Alliance:

• Linda M. Cook – Cook is an independent consultant specializing in Lean and Agile project practices. With more than twenty years’ experience in the IT industry, she has held positions from developer, forms designer, data modeler, analyst, tester, to methodology lead. Cook is a member of the Agile Alliance, the Agile Project Leadership Network, and the Project Management Institute.

• Pat Reed – Reed is senior director of IT delivery management services at Gap Inc. She is tasked with responsibilities including Agile Project Management, Agile Portfolio Management, IT strategic planning and release management as well as continuing to evolve enterprise Agile adoption. Throughout her career, Reed has leveraged Lean and Agile practices.

• Samuel Crescencio – With more than 16 years of experience in the software industry, Crescencio has been practicing and coaching Agile software development since 2003. He has hands-on experience in delivering mission-critical applications in heterogeneous and distributed environments – to various niche markets. He is the founder and CEO of OnCast Technologies, a company headquartered in Florianopolis specialized in outsourcing services, consulting and mentoring in Agile.

• Jim Newkirk– Newkirk previous chair of the Agile 2010 conference, will now assume chairperson responsibilities for the Agile Alliance. Newkirk is director of development for Microsoft’s Health Care Solutions Tools Team. In his more than seven years at Microsoft, Newkirk has held a number of roles including the product unit manager for CodePlex, Microsoft’s community open source project hosting site. He is the co-author of “Test Driven Development in Microsoft .NET” (Microsoft Press, March 2004). Prior to joining Microsoft he co-authored “Enterprise Solution Patterns in .NET” (Microsoft patterns and practices) and “Extreme Programming in Practice” (Addison-Wesley).

In addition, the Agile Alliance named two existing board members to executive committee positions:

• Diana Larsen – In addition to being reelected to the board, Larsen will also serve as treasurer of the organization. Larsen consults with leaders and teams to create work processes where innovation, inspiration, and imagination flourish. With more than fifteen years of experience working with technical professionals, Larsen brings focus to the human side of organizations, teams and projects. Larsen co-authored Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great! She publishes articles and writes occasional blog posts at “Partnership and Possibilities.” Current chair of the Agile Alliance Board of Directors, she co-founded the “Agile Open Northwest” conference and the international “Retrospective Facilitators Gathering.”  

• Esther Derby – Derby has been elected as secretary for the Agile Alliance. She is well known for her work in helping teams grow to new levels of productivity. She helps teams and organizations make the transition to Scrum, and coaches technical people who are making the transition to management. Esther is recognized as one of the world’s leaders in retrospectives, and is co-author (with Diana Larsen) of the book “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great.”

Also, two existing board members Tamara Sulaiman and Paul Culling were re-elected to the Agile Alliance board.

• Tamara Sulaiman, PMP, CST – managing consultant at Applied Scrum, an IT consulting organization and co-originator of the Agile Earned Value Management (EVM), a process recognized for integrating the traditional project management practice of EVM with the Scrum framework.  

• Paul Culling – based in Canada is director of marketing at VersionOne and board member of Agile Vancouver.

The remaining Agile Alliance Board members include, Henrik Kniberg, Laurent Bossavit, Cesar Idrovo, and Phil Brock.

The Agile Alliance continues to increase its membership each year in line with the growing interest and adoption of Agile processes for software development. One key indicator of the increasing adoption of Agile practices is the continuing demand for Agile knowledge by enterprises looking to reap the benefits of the discipline. The Agile Alliance helps meet this demand by publishing content, conducting regional and international educational events and by hosting the industry’s foremost event, the Agile Conference, which brings together development experts from around the globe.