The final phase of gerald-weinberg's career, characterized by three threads: community building through the aye-conference, a prolific self-publishing program through leanpub, and the consolidation of a legacy that would be recognized by the software engineering and testing communities.
AYE Conference and Teaching
Weinberg co-founded the aye-conference (Amplifying Your Effectiveness) with esther-derby and johanna-rothman, providing a venue for experiential learning in the Weinberg tradition. AYE was not a typical software conference — it was workshop-based, emphasizing the kind of immersive, experiential learning that Weinberg had developed through the Problem Solving Leadership (PSL) workshop and the Change Shop. The conference became a gathering point for the community of practitioners shaped by Weinberg's ideas, and it produced amplifying-your-effectiveness-2000, a collected volume from the community. He also maintained the shape-forum, an online community that generated the two Roundtable dialogue volumes.
Self-Publishing and Leanpub
Weinberg embraced leanpub self-publishing as a way to reach readers directly, bypassing the long production cycles of traditional publishing. This produced a stream of works: more-secrets-of-consulting-2001, weinberg-on-writing-2006, perfect-software-2008, agile-impressions-2013, do-you-want-to-be-a-better-manager-2016, errors-bugs-boo-boos-blunders-2017, and the four-volume experiential learning series. He also expanded the original Quality Software Management series into a reorganized multi-volume Quality Software series — including how-software-is-built-2010, how-to-observe-software-systems-2010, responding-to-significant-software-events-2011, and change-planned-and-unplanned-2014 — and wrote several novels including the Aremac science fiction series. He maintained the Secrets of Consulting blog as a late-career channel for reaching readers directly, and published exploring-requirements-two-2011 with donald-gause.
Recognition and Legacy
The Stevens Award (2000) and the EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award (2013) recognized his contributions to software engineering and testing respectively. The Luminary Award (2010) added further recognition. Most meaningful to Weinberg was gift-of-time-2008, a festschrift by students and colleagues edited by fiona-charles — seventeen essays from practitioners whose work Weinberg had shaped.
Weinberg died August 7, 2018, leaving a legacy that runs through the Agile movement (whose first value — "individuals and interactions over processes and tools" — is essentially his thesis), the context-driven testing community (via james-bach, michael-bolton, and cem-kaner), and organizational development practice (via esther-derby, johanna-rothman, and the broader consulting community he trained). The psl-reader-2020, published posthumously by Derby, Rothman, and don-gray, preserved the intellectual inheritance of his most influential workshop.