Program

Rae Abileah dedicated the past decade of her life to peace and justice organizing in the US, with a focus on women's rights as integral to peace-building, through her role as co-director of CODEPINK Women for Peace and by volunteering with various US and international organizations. Rae helped organize creative demonstrations and flash mobs to end violence on women and girls as part of the One Billion Rising campaign in 2012. She is a contributing author to Sisters Singing: Incantations, Blessings, Chants, Prayers, Art and Sacred Stories by Women; 10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military; Beyond Tribal Loyalties: Stories of Jewish Peace Activists; and the new release Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution. Her articles have been published on various online and print news outlets such as Mondoweiss, AlterNet, Common Dreams, and Tikkun.

Rae graduated from a women's college, Barnard College at Columbia University, with a dual degree in Environmental Science and Human Rights. Her activism has led her to participate in UN negotiations on climate change, facilitate workshops on domestic violence prevention in high schools, speak out to expose the costs of US war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, cross borders and cross-pollinate ideas. She compliments her activism with creative writing, cooking brunch, surfing (still working on being truly agile with this sport), photography, and tweeting @raeabileah. She can be reached at rae at raeabileah dot com.

Dave Thomas is a programmer, and now an accidental publisher. Dave Thomas wrote The Pragmatic Programmer with Andy Hunt at the end of the '90s, and that experience opened a new world for them. They discovered a love of writing that complemented their love of learning new things.

Dave Thomas is one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, and probably responsible for bringing Ruby to attention of Western developers with the book Programming Ruby. He was one of the first adopters of Rails, and helped spread the word with the book Agile Web Development with Rails.

Dave Thomas enjoys speaking at conferences, running public and private training. But most of all, Dave Thomas loves coding.

Martin is an author, speaker… essentially a loud-mouthed pundit on the topic of software development. He has been working in the software industry since the mid-80’s where he got into the then-new world of object-oriented software. Martin has spent much of the 90’s as a consultant and trainer helping people develop object-oriented systems, with a focus on enterprise applications. In 2000 he joined ThoughtWorks.

Martin Fowler’s main interest is to understand how to design software systems, so as to maximize the productivity of development teams. In doing this he has looked to understand the patterns of good software design, and also the processes that support software design. Martin has become a big fan of agile approaches and the resulting focus on evolutionary software design.

Ash Maurya has been an entrepreneur for more than a decade, and throughout that time Ash Maurya has been in search of a better, faster way for building successful products.

Then he ran into early works on Customer Development and Lean Startup pioneered by Steve Blank and Eric Ries. He joined in on the conversation and has been rigorously applying and testing these principles since then. Ash Maurya started sharing his learning on his blog, which then turned into a book, and subsequently into a series of products aimed at helping entrepreneurs raise their odds of success.

“Life’s too short to build something nobody wants.” is his mission and reason for being.

I am not Paul Hawken. Or Peter Senge or Richard Branson. But I have studied these social innovators and am diligently working to apply these concepts in a 300-person business, venture-backed startup that I founded in 2002. I am the Chief Sustainability/Social/Strategy Officer and Chief Technology Officer at Rally Software.

We are a How company and I am a How innovator, where the rubber meets the road. I am an expert in helping companies adopt a methodology called Agile development and Lean Startup, loosely defined as methods for delivering small batches in quick cycles to speed learning and innovation. I founded Rally to help make a major impact in the technology industry by moving it from a slow, wasteful and burdensome product model to a fast, sustainable, high-impacting service model. I hope this leads to changes, as Paul Hawken and the Lovins described in Natural Capitalism. The goal here is to break the take-make-waste cycle and move society toward a regenerative service model – a model where work creates joy, diversity, social justice and clean ecosystem services. We are moving beyond product team to Agile portfolio management, as well as agility throughout the organization. You can follow all of my efforts in these areas in my blog posts, like those on Sustainability.

For more than 30 years Todd has developed or lead the development across all aspects of software development. This has included development, project management, functional management, quality management, and product management. Most of his career has been spent in commercial software application development for oil and gas exploration and production. Some of his roles at Landmark Graphics Corp include Director of Software and Technology, Director of Product Integration, and Senior Development Manager.

He is known worldwide as an expert in agile software development. He served on the Board of Directors for the Agile Alliance and is a founder and past President of the Agile Leadership Network. He was a co-author of the "Declaration of Interdependence for Project Leadership." In 2003, he co-founded the Agile Development Conference with Alistair Cockburn. The following 3 years he was the Program Director for the Agile Development 2004, Agile2005, and Agile2006 conferences. In 2011 he returned for the 10 year anniversary of the Agile Manifesto to Chair Agile2011. For 2012 he is leading the Agile Executive Forum.

Todd has published and presented work on a number of topics including business value, strategy, real options, project uncertainty, collaboration, individual and group dynamics, offshore development, and managing uncertainty and complexity. Several of his publications have been printed in IEEE Software and the Cutter IT Journal. Todd is a frequent speaker at the Agile200X Conferences, and several regional and international Agile and Software conferences. He is a co-founder and on the leadership team of Accelinnova, a business consulting group providing leadership tools in the agile arena.

He received a B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from Iowa State University and an M.S. in Petroleum Engineering from The University of Houston. He also received an Executive Certificate in Management and Leadership from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

He is a member of the Agile Alliance, Agile Leadership Network, Scrum Alliance, IEEE, Society of Petroleum Engineers and is a registered Professional Engineer in the State of Texas.