Tom Gilb is an independent teacher, consultant and writer. He has guest lectured at universities all over UK, Europe, China, India, USA, Korea and has been a keynote speaker at dozens of technical conferences internationally.
He is recognized as the founder or major driver of several technical disciplines such as software metrics and evolutionary project management, as well as being an innovative pioneer in Inspections and the inventor of the planning language Planguage.

He is directly recognized as the idea source for parts of the Agile and Extreme programming methods. Tom has mainly worked within the software engineering community, but since 1983 with Corporate Top Management, and since 1988 with large-scale systems engineering (Aircraft, Telecoms, Electronics).

He is the author of nine published books, and hundreds of papers on Agile and related subjects. His latest book, Competitive Engineering (CE), is a detailed handbook on the standards for the ‘Evo’ (Evolutionary) Agile Method, and also for Agile Spec QC. The CE book also, uniquely in the Agile community, defines an Agile Planning Language, called ‘Planguage’ for Quality Value Delivery Management.

His 1988 book, Principles of Software Engineering Management (now in 20th Printing) is the publicly acknowledged source of inspiration from leaders in the Agile community (Beck, Highsmith, and many more), regarding iterative and incremental development methods. Research (Larman, Southampton University) has determined that Tom was the earliest published source campaigning for Agile methods (Evo) for IT and Software. His first 20-sprint agile (Evo) incremental value delivery project was done in 1960, in Oslo.