Recipients

• 2009

  • David Hussman has coached pragmatic adoption of agile methods for hundreds of companies around the world. He is also working on a book “Cutting an Agile Groove” about the techniques he uses with teams he coaches to be published by Pragmatic Bookshelf. Read more… (twitter)
  • Simon Baker and Gus Power's No Compromise, No Excuses approach consistently creates high performing teams that go from "concept to cash every week". Their lean accounting system makes clear to executives what they need to know about software projects. Read more… (blog, twitter)

• 2008

  • Arlo Belshee contributes significant ideas to agile practitioners, influencing the way many individuals and teams work day to day. An experimenter at heart, he tries his ideas in real-life situations, then reports his results. Read more…
  • Kenji Hiranabe has translated several important books to make them available to the Japanese audience, as well as developed original work. Kenji imports and exports ideas and people: he arranged for a delegation of a dozen people to come to Agile 2008. Read more…

  2007

  • Naresh Jain, for his work establishing user groups in India and for the Simple Design and Testing conference. (twitter)
  • Jeff Patton, for his work helping establish what User Centered Design means in Agile (including the agile-usability group) and for being an example of the usefulness of being fluent in two fields (programming and UCD). (twitter)

  2006

  • Laurent Bossavit, for translating Extreme Programming Explained into French, for early and helpful activity on the English-language XP mailing list, for organizing a French-language site, mailing list, and wiki, for XP Day France, for the (incipient) thoughts on his blog, and for his championing of code dojos. (twitter)
  • Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce for helping found XP Day, for their long-time involvement in the Extreme Tuesday Club, for their joint role in the development, evolution, and popularization of the idea of mock objects and its realization in jMock, and for the networks of collaborations they’re involved in (storytelling in Fit and scrapheap programming, for example). (Steve on twitter), (Nat on twitter)

  2005

  • J. B. Rainsberger, for spending a great deal of time helping people on the testdrivendevelopment mailing list, for writing JUnit Recipes, for XP Day Toronto, and for being the Agile 2005 tutorial chair. (general blog, coding blog, twitter)
  • Jim Shore, for his performance as a paper shepherd; for a fine experience report he gave at ADC2003 that, together with his blog, suggest a cast of thought that deserves cultivation; for his work on the Fit specification and the C# version of Fit; and for being a person who holds the Fit world together by doing the sort of organizational and cleanup tasks that are usually thankless. (blog, twitter)

Occasionally, the Gordon Pask Award committee also wants to highlight impressive actions taken by other people in the community. In the past, we have highlighted the following people and activities.

• Corey Haines' pair programming tour – find out more at http://programmingtour.blogspot.com/ The Gordon Pask Award committee encourages Agile Alliance members to support Corey with this.
• Bob Payne's Agile Toolkit Podcast of Agile leaders and practitioners, and his Agile Philanthropy program which has, among other things, organized Agile conference attendees in developing the http://www.manoamano.org/ website while they are at the conference.
• The committee also broke from its charter in 2006 to create a new award—the Ward Cunningham Gentle Voice of Reason Award—and awarded it to Dale Emery for what he’s done on the XP and other mailing lists, and in person; and also for his work creating environments where change happens (rather than, as J. B. Rainsberger put it, “inflicting change on people”).