silk and spinach

about kevin rutherford

I’m a freelance agile software developer from Macclesfield in the UK. And I’m a Certified Scrum Master and Chartered Engineer with over twenty years’ experience in all aspects of software development. For details of my background and experience, see my LinkedIn profile.

I am a member of the Agile Alliance, and I founded the UK’s Agile North group. I contribute regularly to the agile community, and someday soon I’ll get around to posting my speaking schedule here somewhere.

contact me

You can reach me in all these ways:

about silk and spinach

I’m one of those people - my left and right brains communicate with each other via my mouth and ears, so that I rarely know what I think until I hear myself speak. By which time it’s usually too late. So to prepare myself for the real world a little more, I’ve taken to recording some of the conversations I have with myself - hoping that my brain can communicate with itself via the keyboard and my eyes.

This blog began as an attempt to get my ideas straight on ‘good’ software design. As time has passed I’ve strayed into project management, software development processes and a plethora of related topics. So this blog is primarily about software development. I’m passionate about developing defect-free software rapidly and to order, and I coach teams to do the same. You’ll find lots of thoughts here on agile methods (particularly scrum, tdd and extreme programming), lean thinking, the theory of constraints etc.

This is also an exercise in learning about what a blog is. I’m still not entirely sure I get it, but it’s fun so I plan to continue doing it. I do believe that the web, and the blogsphere in particular, is about connections. So although I have comments enabled, I believe we’re all better off responding to each other by posting on our own blogs. It’s a policy I try to follow, and I urge you to do the same: if you have something great to say, say it in your own blog and link here - we’ll both benefit from the connections that creates. I reserve the right to delete comments I find offensive, and I am very much against anonymity. If you do leave a comment, your email address will not be published or shared.