I am delighted to announce I am joining Microsoft as a Senior Program Manager in Visual Studio ALM. This comes after long discussions with many great thinkers at Microsoft about the future of agility, software development, and the tooling that can best support it.

I am honored to have been selected to join the Visual Studio team and I look forward to helping deliver features that improve life for Microsoft developers. This is an exciting time in Microsoft’s evolution as any reading of industry news will show and I eagerly anticipate being a small part of that future.

If I do my job well, readers of this blog will know it and I look forward to your opinions on the features I will work to deliver to you.

On Departing Scrum.org

This was not an easy or quick decision. I am thrilled to have spent this last year working with Ken Schwaber, Alex Armstrong, and a talented cast of hundreds at Scrum.org. I leave my position as Chief Software Craftsman with satisfaction knowing our work has genuinely improved our customer’s and partner’s lives as they seek to improve their professional environments and increase their agility.

ADDITION: Read the official Scrum.org announcement here.

I am a huge fan of Scrum.org and the work they do. I wish Ken and the other Scrum.org employees the best success. They have my fullest support in their efforts.

Further, I look forward to an ongoing relationship with Scrum.org and the network of professionals there. They are committed group with a laudable mission. I am proud to work with them and look forward to our continued relationship.

I will continue supporting the Professional Scrum Foundations course, which I authored for Scrum.org, and the trainers who use it to teach Scrum. Supporting that community and staying relevant to that conversation remains a high priority for me.

Next Steps

My family and I are furiously preparing for our next big adventure. We are leaving Boise, Idaho for the bigger and wetter climes of the Puget Sound area and Redmond, Washington. Things will be happening fast as we hope to have the kids start school in the Redmond area in September.

I will be blogging more. Period. I have missed blogging, but I haven’t been motivated to blog much about process. Now that I am getting back to the metal, that will change.

I am thrilled to be coming back to my tribe, which has always been more about tech than not. Frankly, I have missed shipping software and working in teams that do so. I am excited to re-focus on the agile development experience and spend less time in executive-level “convincing them that agile isn’t ridiculous” conversations. Those are important and necessary conversations. I am glad people better suited to them will be helping those folks.

I am honored to have been selected to join the Visual Studio team at Microsoft and look forward to making the world better for Microsoft platform developers.

David Starr