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Dr. Sallyann Freudenberg is an agile coach, consultant and trainer with a keen focus on psychology and collaboration.

She holds a PhD in the Psychology of Collaborative Software Development, performs ethnographic research, publishes and speaks about the ways that experienced agile teams interact, with a particular interest in distributed cognition and the psychology of pair programming. Sal discovered that far from being a solitary or even pair endeavor, programming is done as part of a rich eco-system of people, tools, systems and other artifacts. She found that in these eco-systems people can learn by Legitimate Peripheral Participation. She de-bunked the odd pair-programming myth along the way.

Sal has worked as an agile coach in a wide range of organisations. She has assisted companies (from small start-ups to large, long-established traditional organisations) in transitioning to more nimble, customer-centric and human(e) ways of working.

Since parenting an autistic son, Sal has developed a keen interest in neuro-diversity, re-assessing her own traits and neurology and considering the prolific and extra-ordinary people with whom she has worked over her 25+ years in the tech industry. Given her own experiences and the current research on Autism and I.T., Sal is raising awareness of the benefits of having diversity in our organisations, and is helping the industry to begin to understand how to provide spaces and tools that nurture every kind of brain.