David Athay

As a young boy, I moved around A LOT. I had lived in more than 20 houses before I reached the age of 20. I mention this because, in addition to being a great discussion topic at parties, it also meant that I learned to be "agile" at a very young age. My world was constantly changing and I had to adapt to it all the time. I think this is one of the reasons why the mantra of "Inspect and Adapt" resonates so strongly with me. I was first exposed to agile practices in 2004 when the company I was at started to experiment with Lean Agile Slice. There were nuggets of goodness here that resonated with me, specifically the iterative nature of things. I had been taught from early in my career to code that way as a developer so this was common sense to me. Shortly after our experiment with Lean Agile Slice, around 2005, someone made the great decision that we should look into Scrum and they brought Ken Schwaber into our company to coach us based on his book. Myself and my team took to it fairly quickly and it worked for us! We originally had a Program Manager who stepped in as Scrum Master but soon the team had matured to the point where we would each rotate through as Scrum Master. This went on for years, and I was happy and I loved teaching others about Scrum, giving training courses on Scrum basics, users stories, and estimation to new POs, engineering teams, and internal business partners. Finally, when I moved to another company, I figured it was time for me to get my CSM. I had read many books from Mike Cohn and decided I wanted to attend his course. At first I thought it was just going to be a rubber stamp certification, but I learned a lot in those 2 days. I think I got more out of the course because of my prior experience than those who were coming in cold. Shortly after becoming a CSM, I was asked to step into a PO role. I did this and again I went for a couple of years before taking a course (from Aaron Sanders @ Platinum Edge) to become a CSPO. Again, I found that my experience made the training all the more effective for me. Now I am looking forward to moving on to getting my CSP and to being a vocal evangelist for Scrum and Agile! I find that Agile makes an ideal fit for my other passion which is Customer Based Development. The Scrum process (and Agile as a whole) facilitate me and my teams being able to get closer to customers and deliver great products that match their needs at a pace that I have never seen before. I guess this is why this movement is growing so rapidly.