Alan Cooper is an experienced software developer and interaction designer who's been around for a while. He runs a consulting firm, writes a lot of books, and is called the "father of Visual Basic." Alan Cooper has been on the forefront of experience design and software development for a while now. He's been in the trenches, seen what works and what doesn't, and now he's decided to share some of his experience on software process and why Agile software is best.

Cooper was asked to deliver a keynote at the recent Agile 2008 conference, held in Toronto earlier this August. His slides with accompanying notes are available on his website, and make a really great presentation both for those already converted to agile methods and those who've heard the term but don't really know what it's about.

I ran into this presentation twice in the past few weeks, prompted to check it out by co-workers. I put it off, but when I finally watched the presentation I was pretty amazed. We struggle a lot internally at finding the right processes to adapt to our constantly-changing set of clients, and while we're already doing a lot of this stuff, I was really encouraged to see some truly fresh ideas we can implement.

Cooper really knows his stuff, and has some great ideas that software developers, project managers, and designers can all benefit from. Check it out.

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