Board

Board of Directors

President: Matt Roberts is an Agile pragmatist who is currently making Agile work as Director of Research and Development for Hyperformix, a product company that is leading the market in developing an integrated suite of applications for Predictive IT Management.  Previous to this, he spent a year traveling the United States after leading various turnaround and greenfield product development efforts as Senior Development Manager at Motive, Inc.   In addition, Matt was involved in a variety of startup and consulting roles, where he learned the value of team collaboration, solid engineering principals, user-focused incremental development, and prioritization.  A strong proponent of leadership in all its various forms–most importantly self-leadership and the practice of servant-leadership,  Matt has been coaching and making software development teams’ jobs easier for over ten years.   Outside of his sustainable working hours, Matt can be found mountain biking, competitively sailing, and participating in the multi-sport community here in Austin.  Virginia Tech awarded Matt with a Bachelor of Science in Management Science with a focus on Decision Support Systems.    Matt became a Certified ScrumMaster in 2007, a Certified Scrum Product Owner in 2010, and is in process of becoming a Certified Scrum Practitioner.

Vice President: Walter Bodwell is the founder of Planigle, a company which provides consulting, training and tools to help teams get the most out of agile development. While at Planigle, Walter has worked with companies from start ups to large enterprises to assist them in their software practices. He has also developed an agile project management tool to help teams manage their backlogs, their iterations and their releases.

Prior to that Walter was a senior director at BMC Software where he led engineering of the Service Impact and Event Management and Performance Management product lines (scaling agile to groups of up to 150 engineers across multiple continents).

Program Chair: Janelle Klein is a pragmatic thinker and creative designer with a passion for Agile software development.  Currently an active developer and Agile Practices Leader at New Iron Group, she is dedicated to helping development teams succeed at sustainable continous delivery, and helping to build software talent in the community.  As a developer, Janelle has specialized software expertise in high-availability systems, data integration, database performance and design, and automated test and deployment strategies.  When not coding, training or at a coffee shop talking shop, she enjoys painting, gaming, movies and hanging out on the beach with a Mai Tai and a good book.   Janelle holds Sun and Cisco certifications for Java and networking (SCJP, SCWCD, SCBCD, CCNA), and a B.S. Degree in Computer Science from Oregon State University.

Education Chair: Scott Killen is a founder of Agile Austin and the Agile Practice Leader for PayPal.  He is a Certified ScrumMaster and Certified Scrum Practitioner through the Scrum Alliance and a Certified Project Management Professional (PMP) through the Project Management Institute.  He is co-instructor for an IT Project Management class as well as an Agile Project Leadership class at Austin Community College.  He is a past President of the Austin Software Process Improvement Network, past Chair of the Austin PMI Technical Local Interest Group, and and in 1997 he was awarded a CSQE from the American Society for Quality.

When not thinking about how to build better software, faster, he tells stories to children and adults of all ages. Recognized by the Texas Commission for the Arts, you may have listened to one of his tales at the Texas History Museum, O.Henry Museum, French Legation, Zilker Hillside Theater or another public venue.  He’s even taken second place in two Liar’s contests!

In addition, Scott is an active Toastmaster.  He is a Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM), is V.P of Education for the West Austin II Toastmasters club, and is a past Area K53 Governor.

Treasurer: Yasser Farra is a strong believer in collaborative, iterative development that delivers the highest customer value at the lowest possible cost. He is currently Director of Engineering at All Web Leads, where he leads a talented team of engineers responsible for building real-time systems that deliver high quality leads to top insurance producers. He was previously Director of Enterprise Systems at XO Group (The Knot) where he was responsible for the applications and systems used for managing the relationship with local advertisers on the company’s web sites. Yasser has over 20 years of experience leading technology teams to deliver enterprise software products, with the last 6 years focused on Agile leadership. He is currently spearheading the implementation of innovative Agile techniques that have improved quality, resource allocation and productivity at All Web Leads. At XO Group, he introduced Agile Software Development to his team, and helped improve delivery and customer satisfaction.

Yasser got to Austin as fast as he could and promptly received his Master’s degree in Structural Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. As a father of three soccer-playing girls, he can be often found patrolling the sidelines at area soccer fields.

Communications Chair: David Hawks is a software development optimizer at Agile Velocity and thoroughly enjoys maximizing team potential. Prior to founding Agile Velocity, Mr. Hawks was the Sr. Director of Engineering at RenewData where he was responsible for all software development activities. He has over 15 years in senior technical management positions at RealVue Simulation Technologies, Exterprise (acquired by Commerce One) and Fireman’s Fund Insurance. He received a Bachelor of Business Administration in Management Information Systems from the University of Texas at Austin. He’s a Certified ScrumMaster and Certified Scrum Professional. When not helping teams turn into high performers, he can be found tailgating at UT games, gaming or watching his kids play sports.