iDIA Computing, LLC - George Dinwiddie

George Dinwiddie helps organizations develop software more effectively. Effectiveness may be achieved by improved engineering practices, enhanced design and testing skills, reduced waste effort, clarified goals, better communication and teamwork, or a number of other ways. George helps teams address their current impediments to further excellence.

Kicked off by an early start in television repair, George's career has included electronic hardware development, embedded firmware in assembly, C, and C++, Information Technology in Java, C#, and Ruby, as well as dalliances with other languages. In recent years he has concentrated as much on the human aspects of software development as he has on the technical aspects.

George brings to bear wide experience in a variety of development methods, programming languages and operating environments, helping clients solve today's technical problems and improve tomorrow's development process. He has shared his expertise at such venues as the Agile Conference, XP Day North America, APLN Maryland Chapter, Agile Maryland, and the Simple Design and Testing Conference.

Renaissance Software - James Grenning

The mission of Renaissance Software Consulting is to bring state of the art Agile Development and Design Techniques to the embedded software community, and to support non-embedded companies adopting Agile methods to advance their technical practices in design, test driven development, refactoring and acceptance testing.

James Grenning is the founder of Renaissance Software Consulting, where he trains, coaches and consults worldwide. With more than thirty years of software development experience, both technical and managerial, James brings a wealth of knowledge, skill, and creativity to software development teams and their management. James’ mission is to bring improved technical and management practices to development teams. As his professional roots are in embedded software, he is leading the way to introduce Agile development practices to that challenging world. He is currently writing a book on applying Test Driven Development to embedded software. James was one of the original extreme programming coaches and trainers, always working with the best. He invented Planning Poker, an Agile estimating technique used around the world. He participated in the creation of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

Articles by James have been published in IEEE software, IEEE Test and Measurement, and C++ Report. He has spoken at Embedded Systems Conference, SD West, XP Universe conference, XP/Agile Universe Conference and the International Conference for Java Development. He is also one of the principal authors of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

James has designed embedded applications for weather radar display, FAA control tower displays, distributed automatic testing systems, voice response systems, high-speed cut-sheet printing and communications systems. Areas of interest are software process improvement, Object Oriented Design, programming, embedded systems, project management, extreme programming and agile software development. He has been training and consulting for over ten years providing design, requirements, management, organization, planning, test automation, and process improvement direction to clients on three continents and applications spanning many domains and technologies.

Jake Dempsey

A true mentor and technology advocate, Jake actively supports many organizations of practitioner communities:

• Ruby PureMVC, a ruby port of the popular PureMVC meta-pattern
• WATIJ, a pure Java API created to allow for the automation of web applications. This Google group has over 600 active members and over 20,000 downloads. Jake co-founded Watij.
• Agile Alliance is a community portal for Agile practitioner support with techniques, blog postings, conference and news information. Jake is a member and also on the development team.
• eXPlainPMT, a web-based application that supports the management of Agile projects currently hosts over 3000 users, 800 projects and 25000 stories. Jake began contributing to this tool in 2005 and now acts as the co-owner of the opensource project.
• Comparative Agility and UserStories are two of the web applications Jake partners with Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software to develop.

Jake is currently a Software Architect at Sabre Travel Studios and is also an active consultant to Fortune 500 companies as an agile coach and mentor.

A true technology junkie, Jake can be found at nights and weekends surfing the net, trying out new technologies, and building on his already vast knowledge surrounding the software industry. He can be seen during the day discussing the latest trends in web 2.0 sexiness and in a matter of minutes delve into the inner workings of many language and infrastructure details. His working knowledge of technologies make him ideal for round table discussions on strategic approaches to providing solutions or just being the devil's advocate in a great "which language is better" fight.

A member of the Agile Alliance and advocate, he has spoken at the Polish Agile User Group and also at the Agile 2007 conference on Watij (Web Application Testing in Java).

Tim Ottinger

Tim Ottinger is a skilled developer, trainer, and agile coach who can help transform your team and your software. His insight into software development teams has helped large and small organizations streamline their processes and improve the quality of their software. With over 30 years of software development, he has seen how projects work and how they fail, and can communicate the differences. He has taught crucial programming skills to professional developers in North America and Europe, from small startup companies to high-energy physics projects and large corporations.

Tim is an insightful author with writing credits in Clean Code, Pragmatic Bookshelf magazine, the C++ Report, and other publications. His breakthrough use of index cards as speed-training aids is the basis for the book Agile In A Flash, co-written with Jeff Langr.

He has a passion for developing clean, maintainable, useful software. It is a passion he can ignite in your organization.

Salient Blue - Paul Nelson

Paul began his IT career in 1986 as a software developer for an insurance company, working in Wang Basic on a Wang minicomputer. After 10 years (and a couple detours into Systems Support and Systems Administration), he made the leap from Procedural Programming to OOP the hard way: by learning C++.

Since his introduction to Agile and TDD, Paul has been an advocate for pragmatic approaches to solving real-world problems. He has coached teams and provided classroom training throughout the United States and abroad.

Throughout his career, Paul has worked on systems on multiple platforms including Windows, Macintosh and Unix/Linux. He has worked in several languages including Java, C#, Ruby and C/C++. He is currently growing his Ruby skills and digging deeper into Erlang and other functional languages.

eXPect more - Jeff Morgan

eXPect more is an eXtreme consulting firm that believes in using Agile Software Development to deliver quality software. Driven by the simple priorities articulated in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, eXPect more can help you achieve your extreme potential.

Whether you want to transition your development team to an agile approach or wish to inject some of the eXtreme Programming practices into your team, eXPect more can help. With years of experience and a track record of delivering software using Agile Software Development, eXPect more has what it takes to turn your development team into a highly focused and efficient software delivery organization.