Rachel Davies

Rachel Davies specializes in coaching teams in agile software development and has experience in managing teams, requirements analysis, and programming in several languages. Rachel is a frequent presenter at, and organizer of, industry conferences and she also serves on the board of the AgileAlliance. She is coauthor of the book Agile Coaching.

Rachel has provided guidance to a number of companies to assess their agility level and make recommendations to improve their software development process, working in domains as varied as banking, bioinformatics, cheminfomatics, digital TV, drug safety, harbour board accounts and government waste recycling. One of her largest engagements was at Egg Internet bank where she worked for a year with ten Egg development teams and four additional teams at outsourcing partners Keane and Lostwax.

From 2000-2003, Rachel served as a developer at Connextra Ltd, where she was fully immersed in the end-to-end lifecycle of XP using pair programming and test-driven development for a server-side Java application. She was involved in working with customers to refine stories, planning, coding, deployment and support. At LogicaCMG, she worked with a small team of analysts using a RUP-based process to specify requirements (both UML use cases and operational constraints) for a framework to calculate call charges and discounts in real-time, catering for GSM, GPRS and WAP protocols. She was responsible for mentoring the development team on software architecture, UML, and use of design patterns.

From 1994-2000, Rachel worked as a manager at Marconi plc, where she managed 18 software engineers. She also held managerial and technical positions at Software Development Manager, Brain Power International Ltd, Indigo Tangerine (Software) Services Ltd., Advanced Robotics Research Ltd., Mentor Business Systems Ltd., UNIBIT (Holdings) plc, and System Designers (Scientific) Ltd. Rachel holds a BA in Philosophy from University of York, England and a Computer Technology and Electronics diploma in Software Engineering & Computer Graphics from Middlesex Polytechnic. She is a frequent speaker at industry events in the US and Europe.