Aims to contribute to the growing global profile of Sri Lanka as a center of excellence in software development through this position

Sri Lankan-based Agile guru, GoodAgile Lanka CEO Pete Deemer has been named the Chairman of the prestigious US-based Scrum Alliance®, the largest and most influential professional membership organization and certifying body in the Agile community with over 400,000 members worldwide.      
 
Agile software development has revolutionised software development processes globally and is one of the most used development concepts in the world today. This alternative to traditional project management has been adopted by a number of companies in Sri Lanka’s IT sector and has steadily been gaining popularity locally, to which Deemer has contributed to heavily as a renowned Agile expert. 

Deemer has been based in Colombo, Sri Lanka since 2013, and serves as CEO of GoodAgile Lanka, a Board of Investment company and SLASSCOM member dedicated to training and consulting in Agile practices. He has played an instrumental role within the Sri Lankan IT industry, by providing highly valuable consultancy services to local companies to advance their software development processes to global standards.

He has spent more than 25 years leading teams building products and service at global companies and is a well-known figure in the Agile community. He is the lead author of The Scrum Primer, one of the most widely read introductions to Agile development, as well as The Distributed Scrum Primer, a guide to multilocation Scrum. He also served as vice president of Product Development for Yahoo!, and he was the cofounder of the award-winning GameSpot, which was acquired by CBS Interactive.    
“We are thrilled to have Pete Deemer as the new chairman of our Board of Directors for Scrum Alliance. His expertise and insights will serve us well as we move forward    with many exciting changes to our organization,” stated Scrum Alliance CEO Manny Gonzalez. “Pete’s experience with businesses will help guide us in our new corporate partnership initiatives and his deep knowledge of    foreign markets, like our second-largest region, Asia,    will help us build and further develop our strategic plan for the future.”

Commenting on this, Pete Deemer said: “I am honored to have the opportunity to serve an organisation and community that is bringing about remarkable change to the world of work, and I look forward to contributing to Scrum Alliance as it moves into a new and exciting phase of its existence. I am also proud to have an opportunity to contribute to the growing global profile of Sri Lanka as a center of excellence in software development.”        
Deemer is an honors graduate of Harvard University and served for four years as adjunct faculty at University of California, Berkeley, most recently in the Graduate School of Business, where he received the prestigious Club 6 teaching award. Pete has been a visiting lecturer at the Institute of Systems Science at the National University of Singapore since 2010.