Peter’s company has just started using agile development. While he’s been a developer for a long time, he’s not used agile practices like TDD.

David is a strong engineer that started with Extreme Programming practices about 2001. He’s proficient at most agile engineering approaches and always on the lookout for new cutting edge techniques. The other engineers in his department look to him for ideas and advice.

Alex’s company has been using agile development for about a year. While the agile teams are performing well, Alex has nagging concerns that they’re setting aside long term architectural concerns in favor of short term productivity gains. He’d like to understand how to strike a balance between emergent design and architecture that can up to his personal definition of rigorous.

Billy works on an agile team. He’s an experience analyst trying to understand how he should be doing his job in a new Agile environment. He’s struggling to determine if his old skills of writing use cases and creating workflow models are still useful.

Although Tara’s been a tester for a long time, she’s been working in an agile team for only a few months. Testing is a real challenge in an agile environment. Tara’s finding she needs to be part programmer to use the automated testing framework her company has adopted for acceptance tests. Some days Tara wishes her company would go back to waterfall development.

Deanna’s company is just starting to work with agile development. Her other team members that just came back from agile training have no idea what she should be doing and when. In the mean time she’s supposed to be designing UI for various parts of screens that appear in the next sprint’s stories. Deanna would like help understanding how a healthy UX practice fits inside a tight agile lifecycle.

Patricia is a seasoned project manager. She prefers agile development to her old attempts to force teams to conform to an overly prescriptive plan. But, her stakeholders still ask for the same predictability and schedule commitments. On her agile team she’s considered a ScrumMaster, but she still has lots of old project management responsibilities that don’t seem to fit into that ScrumMaster role.

Parker is an experienced product manager for one of the products in his company’s portfolio of commercially successful products. He’s deeply engaged in determining value and setting priorities for each iteration. Parker would like to understand how agile thinking moves into marketing, sales and product support.

Padma is a business stakeholder responsible customer service in her company. She relies on development for the the software she uses to manage the relationship with the company’s current and potential customers. She’s one of a number of business people in her company that have been pulled into a product ownership role in her company’s agile adoption. She’s got concerns about balancing her old job responsibilities with these new agile team responsibilities and doing a good job as a product owner at the same time.

Marcus is responsible for a group of closely related software products each with its own manager. While the product teams that have started to use agile methods are performing well he’s still got big problems to deal with including: planning across products with architectural dependencies, making and keeping commitments to sales and marketing, being responsive to existing customers, and reacting quickly to his company’s inevitable strategy changes. Peter wonders if agile thinking offers some strategies he can use.

Brooke is a VP in her organization. She’s been asked to investigate agile development. Brook has questions about why agile development is better and how her company should take on adopting and scaling up this approach. After reading a bit about agile, she’s found that “agile exposes organizational problems.” Does this mean that adopting agile will cause her more problems?

Garrett has been in software development and on the leading edge for over 20 years. He’s quick to follow current trends, not because he’s trendy, but because he appreciates new ideas. He’s published three books, the last one on agile development.

Carlos has been recently tapped to help with his company’s effort to adopt agile development. He conducts internal agile training and acts as a ScrumMaster for two internal teams. He acts as an internal consultant for several others. He often doesn’t feel seasoned enough with agile development to be giving the advice he’s often called to give.

After working on an agile team inside his company for three years, Chandra has become a competent expert. Demand from his network of contacts for his services has led Chandra to start working this year as an independent consultant. He’s aware that although he’s competent at what he does, he still has a lot to learn.

Rose is doing research in computer science at her university. Agile development attracted her as a topic because it combined insight about communication and collaboration with practical understanding about creating effective software. She hopes that her research will help practitioners, and also attract interest in the computer science research community. She is an agile enthusiast and teaches about agile in courses, but she looks always for evidence and is interested in exploring areas where agile ideas need further work.

Rubin’s company has sent several people to the conference to learn more about agile. He wants to understand how his current job will change in an agile environment. He’s concerned throwing out all the existing process will just add delay and confusing to his existing project. He wonders how agile could live up to the hype it’s been given.

Ellie has been hearing buzz about agile for a while. The software development group she works for in her company has been struggling for a while. She’s attending the conference to bring back a strategy so they can start using agile. She senses the strong spirit and energy in the agile community, but the amount of jargon is overwhelming.