Dave West is the Chief Product Officer at Tasktop. In this capacity, he engages with customers and partners to drive Tasktop’s product roadmap and market positioning. As a member of the company’s executive management team, he also is instrumental in building Tasktop into a transformative business that is driving major improvements in the software industry. As one of the foremost industry experts on software development and deployment, West has helped advance many modern software development processes, including the Unified process and Agile methods. He is a frequent keynote at major industry conferences and is a widely published author of articles and research reports, along with his acclaimed book: Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, that helped define new software modeling and application development processes. West’s experience includes traditional and object-oriented development for enterprise applications and executive consulting, where he implemented new development processes and tools for IT organizations in Europe and North America. He led the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for IBM/Rational, later adding componentization, SPEMM and support for Agile development. He also managed the development of IBM solutions to support efficiencies in the financial services, product development and government industry sectors. After IBM/Rational, West returned to consulting and managed Ivar Jacobson Consulting for North America. During the past four years he served as vice president, research director at Forrester Research, where he worked with leading IT organizations and solutions providers to define, drive and advance Agile-based methodology and tool breakthroughs in the enterprise. West holds a B.A. in computing and business from Huddersfield University in the UK and a M.Sc. in computer science from Southbank University (UK).