Gertrud focuses on Agile and Lean software development. She does courses and consultancy in user stories, use cases, and product backlogs. Together with her partner Jim Coplien, she also does agile assessments and agile team analyses based on organizational patterns. Her favorite development framework is Scrum. Gertrud has a hobby as a “Software Development Anthropologist” where she analyses trends and practices in software development through the glasses of an anthropologist.

Jim Coplien ("Cope") is the father of Organizational Patterns, is a co- founder of the Software Pattern discipline, a pioneer in practical object-oriented design in the early 1990s and is a widely consulted authority and author in the areas of software design and organizational improvement. He currently works as Software Architect and Agile Consultant at Gertrud&Cope in Denmark. He is also a partner with the Scrum Training Institute, which provides premiere Scrum training and consulting world-wide. He sits on the editorial board of the LNCS Pattern Journal, is a Member Emeritus of the Hillside Group, and is a Certified Scrum Trainer.

Cope does extensive consulting in Europe, North America, and the Middle East, with a special focus on the Nordic countries. He is a frequently-sought conference speaker at major European conferences, and serves as a co-organizer of many patterns conferences. He regularly gives international seminars on Lean Architecture, Scrum fine-tuning, patterns, and Agile software development. He has organized and led outreach programs to make Scrum certification training available at no cost to students at partner universities world-wide, as well as to software professionals in emerging countries. He still writes code for a living once in a while.

He is also a researcher and a past holder of the Vloebergh Endowed Chair at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He has past affiliations with Flinders University in Adelaide and with Manchester University, and is a past professor at North Central College in the United States. He is currently doing joint research with Trygve Reenskaug on the DCI architecture paradigm. He also leads research programs in the theory of design and organizational patterns. Together with Gertrud Bjørnvig, he is writing a new book on Lean Architecture and Agile Software Development, to be published by John Wiley in 2010.

Books

Cope has written or co-authored several books in his career, including the seminal Advanced C++ Programming Styles and Idioms, originally a Jolt Cola productivity winner, and still strong in its sixteenth year.

His most recent book, co-authored with Neil Harrison, is Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development.

He was one of the first authors to treat the concept of domain-driven design, together with modern programming principles such as object orientation, in his Multi-Paradigm Design for C++: