I am currently the Chief Scientist at Disciplined Agile, Inc.  We help teams and organizations to evolve their way of working (WoW) so as to become more effective at delighting their customers.

Why am I involved with Architectural Thinking?

I believe that, as a community, there is an opportunity to help bring architectural thinking into organizations to help them improve their WoW.  As an agilest I’m very eager to work in an evolutionary and collaborative manner.  As a disciplined agilest I’m eager to do so in an enterprise aware manner, and that includes thinking about the bigger picture than you normally would if you were to just focus on the needs of your team. I also hope that we can help people from various disciplines to work together and learn from one another effectively.  Time will tell.

Some of the Things That I’ve Done

I’ve done a lot of process work and sharing of knowledge over the years.  I’ve led the development of several methods/frameworks/toolkits.  The pertinent ones for this effort include:

  1. Disciplined Agile (DA).  With Mark Lines I am a co-creator of the DA toolkit, the focus of which is to guide teams in choosing their WoW.  We believe that DA can be the foundation for business agility in your organization because the toolkit looks at the whole organizational picture, not just software development or IT.  See DisciplinedAgileDelivery.com and the books Choose Your WoW! and An Executive Guide to Disciplined Agile for more information.
  2. Agile Modeling (AM).  The Agile Modeling method, which had its beginnings in Extreme Programming (XP), addresses how to model and document in a lightweight and collaborative manner.  See AgileModeling.com for details.
  3. Agile Data (AD). The Agile Data method grew out of Agile Modeling to address how to apply agile strategies to data-aspects of software development and organizational operations. There is nothing special about data, regardless of what data professionals may claim, and it is not only possible but highly desirable to take an agile approach to data-oriented activities. See AgileData.org for details.
  4. Enterprise Unified Process (EUP). This is based on the Rational Unified Process (RUP).  The goal of the EUP was to extend RUP to address the full range of issues that IT organizations must consider.  Although there are some very solid strategies here, unfortunately the demise of RUP pretty much took EUP with it.  The good news is that these great ideas have been adopted and extended in DA. See EnterpriseUnifiedProcess.com for details.
  5. Software Engineering Method and Theory (SEMAT). SEMAT strives to build a new foundation for software engineering based on both theory and practice.  I’m involved just a little bit these days, but I was involved at the beginning and am now a advisory board member.  See semat.org for details.

More About Me

You can learn more about me at my LinkedIn page or follow me on Twitter.  I’ve written a few books over the years (you can never buy too many copies) and run surveys to discover what is really going on out there in practice.