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Scott W. Ambler - Vice President of Disciplined Agile - Project Management Institute - airfocus Product Hero
Who is Scott W. Ambler?
Scott W. Ambler is a Canadian software engineer, consultant, and author.
He studied computer science (BSc) and information science (MA) at the University of Toronto and has been working in the IT industry since the mid-1980s.
Scott has been at the heart of many of the developments and first steps in software process and agile project management. He led the development of a vast array of agile methodologies, including disciplined agile delivery, agile modeling, agile data, enterprise unified process, and agile unified process. He even founded his own agile framework, disciplined agile!
Basically, if you know agile, you know Scott Ambler.
Scott was a senior consulting partner with Scott Ambler + Associates, before taking his current role as chief scientist and vice president at disciplined agile (now a part of the Project Management Institute).
Scott has also worked at IBM and Ambysoft and has consulted for a range of IT and tech companies over the years.
Throughout his long and distinguished career, Scott has taken a great interest in Wikipedia. He is a regular contributor to entries around software processes and is a great believer in encouraging others to contribute as fully and accurately as possible. Legend has it that he wrote his own Wikipedia entry, too!
Aside from his professional achievements, Scott is a prolific author and writer, with a range of published books largely focusing on the disciplined agile toolkit.
Some of his most well-known works are:
He was a contributing editor with Dr. Dobb's Journal and wrote articles for Software Development, Object Magazine, and Computing Canada, among other publications.
On top of being at the heart of agile, developing his own methodologies and toolkits, and publishing authoritative books, columns, and articles, Scott is also a regular at some of the most significant practitioner and academic conferences around the world.
He’s been the keynote speaker at Agile 20XX, Agile India 20XX, Software Development, Agile Universe, UML World, JavaOne, OOPSLA, EuroSPI, and CAiSE, as well as a number of private conferences.
Scott is a Fellow of the Disciplined Agile Consortium and the International Association of Software Architects and was a jolt judge at the Jolt Awards.
What is Scott W. Ambler known for?
Scott is best known as the founder of disciplined agile, an author of many books on the subject, and a key player in the development of a variety of agile frameworks and methodologies. He led the development of both the agile modeling and agile data methods, as well as the enterprise unified process (EUP).
He remains the practice leader behind the agile modeling methodology and continues to help clients around the world adopt evolutionary and agile techniques for doing data-oriented activities.
He’s a frequent conference keynote speaker, where he is an authority on lean/agile enterprises, scaling agile software development, and disciplined agile. He also delivers workshops focused on DA, DevOps, enterprise architecture, agile data, and agile architecture skills.
There isn’t much about agile project management that Scott doesn’t know, or hasn’t participated in the development of, and if you work in agile it would be a shock if you haven’t come across his name or one of his books at some point!
How does disciplined agile (DA) enable teams to optimize their way of working (WoW)?
The disciplined agile (DA) toolkit harnesses hundreds of agile practices to guide teams and organizations towards the most effective way of working.
Taking its reference points from Choose Your WoW! by Scott Ambler and Mark Lines, the DA toolkit is designed to give simple guidance that helps companies streamline their processes. The toolkit is context-sensitive and provides a firm basis for overall business agility.
There are four layers to the DA toolkit: foundation, disciplined DevOps, value streams, and disciplined agile enterprise (DAE). Each layer helps move organizations towards a more productive, effective way of working, and aims to promote growth and business success.
DA includes disciplined agile delivery, a way of moving beyond scrum that streamlines IT work and enables significant scaling. It is essentially a hybrid agile approach to enterprise-level IT solution delivery.
The DA toolkit is comprehensive, and explains each activity in detail, how they work together, what problems they should address, and what the trade-offs are for each option.
Where can you learn more about Scott W. Ambler?
Scott’s thoughts on agile and software processes are available in the many books, articles, white papers, and columns he has written over the years.
As we mentioned before, he’s a keen advocate of Wikipedia. And his own entry is meticulously detailed (no surprises there, if he wrote it himself!). He also writes regularly at the Project Management Institute’s Disciplined Agile Applied blog.
He is an active social media user and posts on Twitter as @scottwambler.
