Tommy Braas

As a 14 year old I bought my first computer. I was the only person in my group of friends, including adults, that had a computer... :) I learnt how to program on that thing. It was a Sinclair ZX 81. 1Kb of RAM... I knew then that I had to work with computer, more specifically program them to do amazing things. I went to university in Sweden for a masters degree in comp sci. During my time at university I managed to get a scholarship to Apple's WWDC in California twice. Going to WWDC allowed me to meet likeminded people, make friends, and soon after the second time I went I was offered a job in San Francisco! Dream come true! It was during my tenure there that I first came into contact with agile practices. Specifically there was a push to adopt XP. It came from the top and wasn't well received by all the developers. The opponents were few and included me, but we went along with it. This was in late 2001. I quickly saw the benefits of the XP practices and have practiced XP ever since. I later joined eBay, and was exposed to more agile practices. I arrived in Australia in late 2006 and the first company I joined was totally committed to agile in a big way. In fact it was their main selling point to clients. We were a small boutique consultancy committed to excellence in our work. Skipping past a few water-scrum-fail approaches I now find myself back at a software company! Yay! The agile journey here started about a year ago. It's going, but could be going better. My main priority is to get my team humming doing all the right things for all the right reasons. Challenge accepted!