Martin, renowned author, software consultant and speaker, brings two decades of experience helping corporations utilise object technology for mission-critical information systems. He was one of the authors of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, and has written seven books on software development and collected awards for them. He's also a highly regarded speaker at international conferences, although these days he prefers to stay off the stage.

His main interest is to understand how to design software systems, so as to maximize the productivity of development teams. In doing this he has looked to understand the patterns of good software design, and also the processes that support software design. He finds he learns a lot from listening to the experiences of his fellow ThoughtWorkers: digging for useful ideas and communicating them to the wider world.