These days you rarely find someone who hasn’t been part of at least one attempt to adopt Agile. However, few of those same people will tell you they are part of an ongoing, successful Agile team. This talk is a collection of the most common things that Barry has seen derail Agile adoptions in his years as an Agile coach. Attendees should come away with a collection of subtle pitfalls to avoid in their next attempt to successfully apply Agile Software Development on the job.
Barry has played various roles in his 17 years in the software industry, including lone developer, team lead, director, and Agile coach and mentor. Barry is one of the few native Atlantans, currently specializing in coaching and mentoring for Agile software development in addition to doing contract software development. Over the years, he has developed on multiple platforms, focusing primarily on Microsoft technologies and then Java from 2003 onward. He views technology as a set of tools, and embraces the use of dynamic as well as statically-typed languages, procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming, each having their own strengths in a given problem domain.
Prior to his career in software, Barry Hawkins spent 10 years designing, selling, and delivering turn-key industrial packaging and marking systems into manufacturing plants throughout the southeastern United States. He was responsible for the implementation, maintenance, and support of every system he sold, which was a formative experience that continues to influence his approach to consulting and coaching.
