About the author

Allan Kelly has held just about every job in IT. London-based, he works for Software Strategy, where he provides training and consultancy in Agile practices. He specialises in working with software product companies, aligning company strategy with products and processes.

He wrote his first program at the age of 12 on a Sinclair ZX81, in Basic. He quickly progressed beyond the ZX81 and spent the mid-80’s programming the BBC Micro in BBC Basic, 6502 Assembler, Pascal and Forth. As well as appearing in several hobbyist magazines of the time, he was a regular on BBC Telesoftware, with programs such as Printer Dump Program (PDP and PDR), Eclipse, Snapshot, Echos, Fonts, FEMCOMS and, with David Halligan, Demon’s Tomb, and EMACS (Envelop Manipulation and Control System, nothing to do with its more famous namesake!).

The low point of this early career came in 1986 when Cambridge Examinations docked a mark from his GCE ‘O’ level Computer Science project for not using the GOTO statement in his code. The high point came five years later when he held an internship at Distributed Information Processing in Guildford, working on the Sharp PC-3000.

He believes his first Agile project was in 1997 - although it might have been 1994. His Agile journey began after the Railtrack Aplan ISO-Waterfall death march in 1996 and reading Jim McCarthy’s Dynamics of Software Development (1995). Since 2000 he has helped numerous companies - particularly in Cornwall - adopt Agile and Lean ideas.

In addition to numerous journal articles and conference presentations, he is the author of Business Patterns for Software Developers (2012) and Changing Software Development: Learning to be Agile (2008), both published by John Wiley & Sons. He is also the originator of Retrospective Dialogue Sheets (www.dialoguesheets.com).

More about Allan at http://www.allankelly.net and on Twitter as @allankellynet.