Kenneth Duffill has been a freelance software developer for almost thirty years. During the early years he quickly became disillusioned with the heavyweight, top-down, waterfall processes he was made to follow. Because these processes inevitably resulted in poor quality software, he thought maybe his calling might be in Software Quality Management. But this too was riddled, at the time, with heavyweight processes. All hope seemed to disappear, maybe he was doomed to a career of writing software (because that is what he is good at), taking the money and running, like so many other contractors seemed to be doing, and forget the idea of 'making a difference' or even 'enjoying your work'.

In 2002, just a year after it was published Ken chanced upon the Agile Manifesto, and hope was restored. The manifesto itself chimed so well with his own philosophy that he became an independent signatory in March/April of that year. And the twelve principles; well, they are just obvious aren't they?

Clearly not! There followed almost a decade of dissapointment as client after client refused to listen to the wisdom revealed by the Agile Movement. "Agile is just the next shiny new toy", "it is just a fad and it will never work". These were the common declarations made by big clients as they imposed ever more heavyweight processes in the search for that illusive thing called 'quality'.

Ken's first brush with Scrum came at an ACCU conference in Oxford (UK) in about 2008. Clearly based upon the agile principles, it appealed to him right away. And it was beginning to become acceptable in 'real' industy, at last. At least that is what the presenter claimed.

It was still another couple of years before Ken was lucky enough to actually work for a client who was prepared to try it, though.

After a ScrumMaster course with Gabrielle Benefield and Jeff Sutherland in May 2010 Ken became Certified ScrumMaster, and since then has worked as a member of their scrum team for two clients.

In 2012 Ken took on the role of scrum master for the first time. And in the first half of that year guided two projects through impressive progress. In May 2012 he became Certified Scrum Professional and now helps other scrum masters to guide their projects to similar success.

Read Less