Summary: <br> For over twenty years Mike has been building high-performing software development teams and organizations through the use of Agile and Scrum. He's worked with startups and some of the largest organizations in the world.<br> <br> <br> Transcript<br> Clayton Hunt: With us today is Mike Cohn. For over 20 years, Mike has been building high performing software development teams and organizations through the use of Agile and Scrum. He's worked with startups and some of the largest organizations in the world. Welcome, Mike.<br> <br> Mike Cohn: Thanks Clayton, it's nice to be here.<br> <br> Jon Ash: Before we kind of jumped into the meat of things. Would you just kind of give us a little bit of background about yourself kind of, maybe how you got started in the industry and-<br> <br> Mike Cohn: I think I had a pretty typical progression started out as a programmer. I got into that as a PhD student in economics and dropped out what's called, 'all but dissertation' when I saw how much you make with a PhD, was a lot less than you made with a Master's. I quit with my masters and went places working and doing economics research. And everywhere I went back then they needed more programming help than they need to one more economist, so just kind of stuck with that and it's what I love doing anyway. I started out that way as a programmer, worked my way up to managing teams, director in different organizations VPC, all type things. I fairly typical programmer to management progression, I believe.<br> <br> John Callaway: Very nice. How did you get involved in the whole Agile movement?<br> <br> Mike Cohn: I knew Ward Cunningham, who was one of the guys at the Agile Manifesto meeting. He emailed me the day after the meeting. I just worked on a project here in Boulder, Colorado, He emailed me the next day and said, “Hey, look what I did over the weekend.” And that was the Agile Manifesto. I got involved with that and through that met Mary, Pop and Decken. We were kind of the Mary and I were the two that kind of Co-founded the Agile Alliance just kind of get it going, just to get the paperwork and then brought a whole bunch of other people like, Bob Martin and stuff and right at the beginning but. I was right there right afterwards through the relationship with ward.<br> <br> John Callaway: With the formation of the Agile Alliance and things like that, you've authored a number of books, many of which I've got on the shelf behind me, hasn't been just well received, and the community responding well, right out of the gate. How much of a transition from the old software development practices, many of which were waterfall types of development, how easy is that transition or has that transition been for the companies that you've worked with or been involved with?<br> <br> Mike Cohn: Well, I think a lot of us were doing Agile before the name came around, the name got assigned in 2001. I've been doing Scrum since 95 when it really first got started. But back in the late 90s, if you were doing what's called Agile today, you really felt alone. Everybody was doing what was called the Rational Unified or the Unified Process back then. The company in particular that I worked for, we were buying, not a lot, but maybe a handful of companies a year, and every time we bought one, they were doing the Unified Process, and they'd have this wonderful documentation that's great to artifacts, and we'd buy them and I'd constantly be like, oh man, maybe we need the time to do these documents. Look at how much better they were, the hell of these nice documents, and after doing that for a couple years, seven or eight companies like that. It was like, okay, there's a reason we're buying them, they're not buying us.<br> <br> Mike Cohn: I was just very thankful that we'd always been too busy to do those documents.
