Alex Viggio, President

Alex Viggio founded XP Denver in August of 2000, while at a dotcom startup that was exploring Extreme Programming. Working in software development since the late 80's, Alex has seen tools and methods come and go. XP struck a chord and he wanted to meet other professionals interested in agile methods. Alex calls Colorado's Front Range home and seeks to promote best practices that will keep local software teams competitive globally. Alex recently joined bivio Software to work on the bOP open source framework that is built using agile and test driven practices.

Alicia Yanik

Alicia Yanik has been managing web-based software development projects since 1998. She became an agile zealot in 2004 and began her role as ScrumMaster in the spring of 2004. Since then, she's led the adoption and implementation of Scrum for Atlas OnePoint, a division of Atlas DMT. Although not yet a renowned expert in anything, she has high hopes for her future in agile development.

Franz Garsombke

Franz Garsombke, an Architect at a large telecommunications company, has been developing and architecting enterprise software solutions for the last nine years, using Java for the past six years. He has worked in various industries including dot-com, B2B, telecommunication, healthcare, and large commercial retail. Franz has been published in the Java Developer's Journal as well as the Software Quality Journal. He has spoken at the Denver Java User's Group and has also lectured at Oracle Open World. He has built everything from an e-commerce system that generates millions of dollars a day in revenue to a healthcare-based exchange that handles thousands of transactions between hospitals and their suppliers. His latest project has been an automated GUI based build and deployment system that manages 70+ applications. Franz is a huge proponent of open source code and frameworks.

Lisa Crispin

Lisa Crispin is dedicated to making the world safe for software development teams (especially testers such as herself) by promoting agile development. To this end, she contributes articles related to agile testing to magazines and newsletters such as Better Software, Methods and Tools, Agile Times and Novatica. You can also find Lisa at conferences, user group meetings and seminars related to agile development and testing, helping people discover why agile teams make testers happy, and testers make agile teams happy. She co-authored Testing Extreme Programming (Addison-Wesley, 2002) with Tip House. She is ecstatic to be helping out with the Agile 2005 conference, to be held right here in Denver - please contact her if you would like to volunteer! When she's not testing, Lisa can be found enjoying dressage with her equine partner Dodger, or driving Ernest, the miniature donkey. Lisa can be contacted at lisa.crispin@att.net; cell phone 303-268-7323. Her website is at http://lisa.crispin.home.att.net.

Mike Cohn

Mike Cohn is the founder of Mountain Goat Software, a Colorado, USA-based process and project management consultancy and training firm. He is the author of User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development and the upcoming Agile Estimating and Planning (Summer 2005), as well as books on Java and C++ programming. With more than 20 years of experience, Mike has previously been a technology executive in companies of various sizes, from startup to Fortune 40. He has also written articles for Cutter IT Journal, IEEE Computer, Better Software, Software Test and Quality Engineering, Agile Times, and the C++ Users' Journal. A frequent speaker at industry conferences, Mike is also a founding member of the Agile Alliance and serves on its board of directors. He is a Certified ScrumMaster and a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM and can be reached at mike@mountaingoatsoftware.com.

Zach Nies

Zach Nies has been developing software and leading product development groups for nearly 15 years. His experience includes: leading the technical aspects of the Desktop Division at Quark, Inc. as the Chief Software Architect; starting a desktop software company and selling the intellectual property associated with it to Creo, Inc.; leading the technical aspects of an award winning Denver based product development group for Creo, Inc.; founded and is the Chief Technologist of Ralston Technology Group, an Arvada based software company; and is a Principal Architect at a large telecommunications company. He has technical leadership experience with engineering teams as small as 2 and as large as 85. Zach also has experiences speaking at several industry conferences and has served on the HTML working group within the W3C. While at Creo, the product development group used Extreme Programming very successfully for over 3 years. These experiences have led him to embrace and promote agile development methodologies.