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Speaker Index

Steve Adolph

An agile coach with Blue Agility and cofounder of e-learning publisher Development Knowledge, Steve Adolph pursues his passion for helping organizations get the job done. Steve has been creating and managing software development projects long enough to remember FORTRAN and PDP-11s. His professional career includes many exciting and critical projects—designing call processing software for digital telephone exchanges, design and development of leading edge network management systems, railway signaling, and telecom billing. Coauthor of Patterns for Effective Use Cases, Steve has diverse job experience—from developer to chief engineer to CTO.

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Bob Aiello

Technical editor of CM Crossroads and author of Configuration Management Best Practices: Practical Methods that Work in the Real World, Bob Aiello is a consultant and software engineer specializing in software process improvement, including software configuration and release management. He has more than twenty-five years of experience as a technical manager at top New York City financial services firms, where he held company-wide responsibility for configuration management. Bob served as vice chair of the IEEE 828 Standards Working Group on CM Planning and a member of the IEEE Software and Systems Engineering Standards Committee Management Board. Contact Bob at [email protected], via LinkedIn, or visit cmbestpractices.com.

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Dude Solutions
Concurrent Sessions Power Your Teams with Git
Josh Anderson

Josh Anderson loves software. A beat-up TRS-80 changed his life, and Josh now spends almost every moment that he is away from his family figuring out how to better the craft of software. Solving hard problems and sharing those solutions with the community fuel his passion. Josh spent the past fifteen years in the trenches, learning how to build and lead effective and efficient software engineering teams. In an effort to pass his learnings on to others, he now co-hosts a podcast with fellow agile evangelist Bob Galen. You can find Josh at @nosrednAhsoJ (personal) and at @metahyphencast (podcast).

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Sanjiv Augustine

Sanjiv Augustine is an entrepreneur, industry-leading agile and lean expert, author, speaker, management consultant and trainer.  With 25 years in the industry, Sanjiv has served as a trusted advisor over the past 15 years to executives and management at leading firms including:  Capital One, The Capital Group, CNBC, Comcast, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, General Dynamics, HCA Healthcare, The Motley Fool, National Geographic, Nationwide Insurance, Walmart and Samsung. Sanjiv is the author of the book Managing Agile Projects (Prentice Hall 2005) and several publications including “Transitioning to Agile Project Management” and “The Lean-Agile PMO: Using Lean Thinking to Accelerate Agile Project Delivery.” He is the Chair of the Agile Alliance’s Agile Executive Forum and the founder and moderator of the Lean Startup in the Enterprise Meetup.  Sanjiv was also a founder and advisory board member of the Agile Leadership Network (ALN), and a founder member of the Project Management Institute’s Agile Community of Practice.

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Arlen Bankston

Arlen Bankston is an established leader in the application and evolution of Agile software development processes such as Scrum, Kanban and Extreme Programming, as well as process management methodologies such as Lean and Six Sigma. He is a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, Certified ScrumMaster® Trainer and Certified Scrum Product Owner. He has sixteen years of experience, beginning in product design, where he leveraged principles of information architecture, interaction design and usability to develop innovative products that met customers’ expressed and unspoken needs. Arlen has led Agile and Lean deployment and managed process improvement projects at clients such as Marriott, Capital One, Neustar, CCP Games, T. Rowe Price, Freddie Mac, and the Armed Forces Benefits Association. Arlen led novel work to combine Lean Six Sigma process improvement methods with Agile execution to dramatically improve both the speed and quality of business results, as well as early integration of interaction design and usability practices into Agile methodologies, presenting and training frequently at both industry conferences and to Fortune 100 clients.

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Mike Benkovich

Mike Benkovich brings it all—energy, laughter, and a contagious passion for coding—with him. In a career that has taken him from minion to business owner, from database administrator to developer, from author to evangelist, Mike has seen it all. In more than twenty-five years of working in the technology industry, he has been part of the latest waves to sweep the industry. Whether delivering MSDN events live or webcast presentations, on the developer resource site BenkoTips or his blog, Mike brings enthusiasm for tools and an energy for the search to find a better way. Follow Mike on Twitter @mbenko.

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Gregg Boer

Gregg Boer is a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft with 25 years of experience in software. Over his career, Gregg has worked as a Project Manager, Program Manager, Requirements Lead, Software Engineer, Analyst, QA Lead, and Software Designer. Most of his experience is focused on leading small to medium software development teams (10-15 people). Over the years Gregg believes he has made many mistakes, learned many lessons, and worked with many smart people to develop great software. He loves the software industry, and considers himself a lucky man to have been a part of it for so long. Gregg joined Microsoft in 2005 because he believed in the vision of Team Foundation Server. He truly believes that the right set of collaborative tools could help make the lives of software engineers better. Most recently at Microsoft, Gregg is working on the team developing a set of world-class Agile Tools built on top of the TFS Platform.

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Jennifer Bonine

A VP of global delivery and solutions for tap|QA, Inc., Jennifer Bonine began her career in consulting, implementing large ERP solutions. Jennifer has held executive level positions leading development, quality assurance and testing, organizational development, and process improvement teams for Fortune 500 companies in several domains. In an engagement for one of the world’s largest technology companies, Jennifer served as a strategy executive and in corporate marketing for the C-Suite. In her career, she has had several opportunities to build global teams from the ground up and has been fortunate to see how many of the world’s top companies operate from the C-Suite viewpoint.

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Shawn Button

An expert in agile development practices, Shawn Button is an agile/lean coach with the proven ability to help individuals, teams, and enterprises adopt better ways of working. Shawn believes that any team can do great things—with the right leadership, mentorship, and support. His passion is helping teams find their full potential, while helping to transform the system they are working in. Shawn is part of LeanIntuit, a group of passionate coaches who help people and companies work in better ways.

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The David Consulting Group
Thomas Cagley

With more than twenty years of experience in the software industry, Tom Cagley is DCG’s agile process manager. Previously, Tom has held technical and managerial positions in different industries as a leader in software methods and metrics, quality assurance, and systems analysis. His areas of expertise encompass management experience in a wide variety of methods and metrics—lean software development, agile software development, and quality and quality assurance to achieve process improvements. Tom is a certified ScrumMaster, certified Scaled Agile Framework Program Consultant, TMMi Accredited Assessor, IT-CMF Tier 2 Associate, and holds an IT-CMF Professional Certificate.

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Thomas Cagley Jr

With more than twenty years of experience in the software industry, Tom Cagley is DCG’s agile process manager. Previously, Tom has held technical and managerial positions in different industries as a leader in software methods and metrics, quality assurance, and systems analysis. His areas of expertise encompass management experience in a wide variety of methods and metrics—lean software development, agile software development, and quality and quality assurance to achieve process improvements. Tom is a certified ScrumMaster, certified Scaled Agile Framework Program Consultant, TMMi Accredited Assessor, IT-CMF Tier 2 Associate, and holds an IT-CMF Professional Certificate.

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Agile For All
Jake Calabrese

An enterprise agile systems coach and agile trainer with Agile For All, Jake Calabrese has more than twenty years of IT experience in a variety of roles and industries. Jake believes that agile must be more than simply ceremonies and practices. We must dig into the more difficult challenges of strengthening people’s relationships and teams, their ability to work together, and their culture. Valuing people is the key to organizations thriving in an increasingly complex, fast, and social world. And beyond that, we need to value relationships!

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Mike Clement

A husband, father of four, and currently a Learning Coach, Chief Curriculum Officer and Co-founder of Greater Sum, Mike Clement believes we work best when we are working together and that there are no best practices—only better and worse ones depending on the context. Passionate about raising the bar of technical excellence in the software development community, Mike is a founding member of Utah Software Craftsmanship and organizer of Agile Roots. He has worked at several companies including Pluralsight, Ancestry.com, Microsoft, and Caselle. Find out more about Mike on his blog and on Twitter at @mdclement.

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Linda Cook

A recognized technology leader and agile transformation expert, Linda Cook is committed to helping organizations achieve their strategic goals. With more than twenty years of experience as an IT executive, Linda offers a unique blend of leadership, innovation, and vision that allows her to tackle the most complex organizational challenges. Formerly an agile program leader at PayPal, she currently leads a lean/agile consulting practice for Project Cooks, LLC.

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TechWell Corp.
Lee Copeland

With more than thirty years of experience as an information systems professional at commercial and nonprofit organizations, Lee Copeland has held technical and managerial positions in applications development, software testing, and software process improvement. At TechWell Corp., Lee has developed and taught numerous training courses on software development and testing issues, and is a sought-after speaker at software conferences in the United States and abroad. He is the author of the popular reference book, A Practitioner’s Guide to Software Test Design.

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Blue Agility

Since 1999 Anthony Crain has lead enterprise organizational change initiatives for IBM and now for Blue Agility. He is known for his outstanding mentoring and teaching abilities, clearly explaining the practical side to theoretical concepts in an exciting and actionable manner. A dynamic speaker who energizes his audience, Anthony has introduced thousands of people to agile, portfolio management, requirements, architecture, and numerous other engineering topics. He has led transformations in diverse industries—commercial banking, software development, automotive, healthcare, financial, government, retail, automated controls, manufacturing, power, telecom, home mortgage, and more.

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Anthony Crain

Since 1999 Anthony Crain has lead enterprise organizational change initiatives for IBM and now for Blue Agility. He is known for his outstanding mentoring and teaching abilities, clearly explaining the practical side to theoretical concepts in an exciting and actionable manner. A dynamic speaker who energizes his audience, Anthony has introduced thousands of people to agile, portfolio management, requirements, architecture, and numerous other engineering topics.

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Denise Dantzler

In the past twenty years, Denise Dantzler has served in various senior management roles across diverse industries—banking, transportation, telecommunications, payment processing—leading teams spanning all IT functions, business analysis, technical writing, HRIS, QA, and PMO. Starting in 2009, Denise managed the Scrum implementation within her company, serving as ScrumMaster and Scrum Coach while simultaneously managing various engineering teams. A Certified ScrumMaster and IT Project Manager, Denise has a passion for coaching others and offers leadership training to emerging leaders, Scrum training, and a deep-dive into Scrum lessons learned. Contact Denise for more information at [email protected].

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Intel ISecG
Noopur Davis

As VP of global quality at Intel ISecG, Noopur Davis heads product quality, enterprise agility, product security, and interoperability. Noopur started her career as an embedded systems programmer, made the journey into management, and, while leading a complex project with teams scattered worldwide, started thinking about organizations, people, process, and quality.  This led to a change in direction from product engineering to product development excellence: the people, process, and leadership aspects essential to creating awesome products.

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Richard Dolman

An enterprise agile coach and trainer with agile42, Richard Dolman has been practicing agile/lean for ten years and is a Certified Scrum Professional, Certified ScrumMaster, PMI Agile Certified Practitioner, Scaled Agile Framework Program Consultant, and ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Coaching. Richard’s clients have included GE, Nelnet Diversified Services, Philips Healthcare, and others. Along with Steve, Richard has created and maintains agilescaling.org as a community resource for those seeking ideas and perspective on “scaling agile.” Follow Richard on Twitter @richarddolman.

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Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory
Brian Duncan

Passionate about software development, Brian Duncan has led highly efficient software teams in the commercial and government sectors for more than twenty years. Having introduced agile software methods in two very different cultural organizations, Brian understands the steps necessary for technical training, social engineering, and project adoption at all levels of the company hierarchy. A strong leader, coach, and technical manager, Brian knows how to help people reach their maximum potential in small agile teams. Currently working agile adoption at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Brian works with multidisciplinary teams developing space projects for NASA and DoD sponsors. Contact him at [email protected].

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Chris Espy

Chris Espy is a well-known agile professional with twenty-five years in software development spanning many diverse industries—missile defense, real-time simulation, telecommunications, healthcare, international payments, and finance. He has helped design and execute some of the largest enterprise agile transformations attempted. Currently, Chris is a management consultant with SolutionsIQ, helping companies transform into an agile culture by working with company leadership and coaching individual development teams.

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Heather Fleming

As senior director of the program management organization at Gilt, Heather Fleming oversees the execution of strategic technology initiatives across the company’s 170-member tech team. Heather’s chief aim is to challenge the status quo of project management best practices by continually experimenting with agile project management methodologies. Since joining Gilt in 2010, she has directed a wide variety of customer-facing, international, and back office projects instrumental to the ecommerce leader’s continued growth and success.

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Bob Galen

An agile methodologist, practitioner, and coach, Bob Galen ([email protected])helps guide companies in their adoption of Scrum and other agile methodologies and practices. Bob is a principal agile evangelist at Velocity Partners; president of RGCG; and frequent speaker on software development, project management, software testing, and team leadership. He is a Certified Scrum Coach, Certified Scrum Product Owner, and an active member of the Agile and Scrum Alliances. Bob published Scrum Product Ownership–Balancing Value from the Inside Out.

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Tom Gimpel

Tom Gimpel is Vice President of Product Development and Delivery for SofterWare: a market leader for over 30 years in software solutions for non-profit organizations, childcare centers, camps, and schools. In this role, Tom is responsible for overseeing product development, software engineering, and quality control efforts for all of SofterWare’s product lines (including DonorPerfect Online, WebLink, DonorPages, and EZ-Care) for more than 25,000 customers. Tom has spent more than 25 years in software development leadership at numerous companies. Prior to joining SofterWare, Tom was SVP/Chief Software Architect at GMAC Commercial Mortgage and a frequent speaker at industry conferences. Tom is an agile development champion, and a former Microsoft Customer Advisory Board Member with expertise in enterprise development and software integration approaches, as well as a three-time recipient of the “Digital Innovation” and "Top 30 People to Watch" awards by the Realcomm conference, an industry technology organization. Tom also created SofterWare’s first mobile application for iPhone and Android.

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Coveros, Inc.
Gene Gotimer

Gene Gotimer is a senior architect at Coveros, Inc., a software company that uses agile methods to accelerate the delivery of secure, reliable software. As a consultant, Gene works with his customers build software better, faster, and more securely by introducing agile development and DevOps practices such as continuous integration, repeatable builds, unit testing, automated functional testing, analysis tools, security scanning, and automated deploys. He has successfully brought these techniques into commercial and government clients, including the US Department of Defense. Gene feels strongly the repeatability, quality, and security are all strongly intertwined; each of them is dependent on the other two, which just makes DevOps that much more crucial to software development.

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Grabel Consulting Services, LLC
David Grabel

Currently bringing agile beyond engineering, David Grabel is a passionate enterprise agile coach. He has introduced Scrum, kanban, XP, and SAFe to organizations from single team startups to organizations with more than 500 teams. David helped develop a process to integrate lean UX design with Scrum delivery teams that was rolled out to fifteen lean UX teams supporting more than one-hundred delivery teams worldwide. A certified CSM, CSP, and SPC, he is studying at the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership. David is president of Agile New England.

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Jon Hagar

Jon Hagar is an independent consultant working in software product integrity, testing, verification, and validation. For more than thirty-five years Jon has worked in software engineering, particularly testing, supporting projects which include control systems (avionics and auto), spacecraft, IoT, mobile-smart devices, and attack testing for smart phones. He authored Software Test Attacks to Break Mobile and Embedded Devices; has presented hundreds of classes and more than fifty conference presentations; and written numerous articles. Jon is an editor for ISO, IEEE, and OMG standards.

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Improving Enterprises
Michael Hall

As Principal Consultant at Improving Enterprises, Michael Hall specializes in new product development using agile methods and Lean Startup principles. Michael has more than thirty years’ experience developing and delivering large-scale cloud-based systems, next-generation mobility solutions, mobile apps, embedded device systems, and wireless telecom systems. This deep technical experience gives Michael an excellent base of real-world product development knowledge and insightful understanding of the challenges a team is likely to face when transitioning from traditional to agile. An early adopter of agile methods, Michael has led several successful enterprise-wide transformations to agile.

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Dawn Haynes

Dawn Haynes is COO, principal trainer, and consultant for PerfTestPlus, Inc., and a former director of the Association for Software Testing. Dawn’s unique blend of experience, humor, and effectiveness at providing tools and techniques that help students at all levels generate new approaches to common and complex software testing problems has resulted in her international recognition as an elite trainer of testers. She provides consulting services and is a frequent speaker at testing conferences, local groups, and intimate gatherings of testers. Dawn has more than twenty-eight years of experience supporting, administering, developing, and testing software and hardware systems—from small business operations to large corporate enterprises.

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Principal Financial Group
Annette Head

A QA leader at Principal Financial Group, Annette Head has more than fourteen years experience in the QA field, leading testing efforts for web applications, web services, and home-grown tools. Annette teaches Scrum, Kanban, and Cucumber within her organization, and loves coaching and mentoring on all things agile. She has been a board member of the Des Moines Area Quality Assurance Association. In her free time, Annette volunteers as a teaching assistant and as a mentor for Tech Journey (techjourney.org/) and HyperStream (hyperstream.org/), organizations that encourage youth to learn about and pursue technology careers.

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Elisabeth Hendrickson

Elisabeth Hendrickson, better known as testobsessed, has been kicking around the software industry for a couple of decades in a variety of roles including tester, developer, and agile enabler. Author of Explore It!, Elisabeth is known for her Google Tech Talk on agile testing and popular test heuristics Cheatsheet. In 2010 she won the prestigious Gordon Pask Award from the Agile Alliance. After more than a decade as an independent consultant, in 2012 Elisabeth joined Pivotal, the company where she first learned extreme programming. She is now a senior director of engineering.

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Spirent Communications
Marc Hornbeek

Marc Hornbeek is senior solutions architect for DevOps and infrastructure test optimization solutions at Spirent Communications. Marc recently managed the large-scale DevOps infrastructure for Spirent’s Cloud and IP business unit. He has acted as the primary architect of test and lab automation tools, and champion of test automation solutions for firms ranging from start-ups to large multinational companies. Marc has won multiple company innovation awards for test automation and protocol test systems that are considered strategic to the success of businesses that use them.

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Andy Hunt

One of the seventeen authors of the Agile Manifesto, Andy Hunt is a programmer-turned-consultant, author, and publisher. After working at large Fortune 500 companies and small startups, Andy and Dave Thomas joined to write the seminal software development book The Pragmatic Programmer. Founders of The Pragmatic Programmers, Dave and Andy are well known as early supporters of the agile movement. The books published by their Pragmatic Bookshelf help keep developers at the top of their game. Andy has authored nine books, including Pragmatic Thinking & Learning and Learn to Program with Minecraft Plugins: Create Flaming Cows in Java for the kids. Follow Andy on Twitter @PragmaticAndy.

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David Hussman

Working with companies of all sizes worldwide, David Hussman teaches and coaches the adoption of agile methods as powerful delivery tools. Sometimes he pairs with developers and testers; other times he helps plan and create product roadmaps. David often works with leadership groups to pragmatically use agile methods to foster innovation and a competitive business advantage. Prior to working as a full-time coach, he spent years building software in the audio, biometrics, medical, financial, retail, and education sectors. David now leads DevJam, a company composed of agile collaborators. As mentors and practitioners, DevJam (devjam.com) focuses on agility as a tool to help people and companies improve their software production skills.

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Sue Johnston

Sue Johnston's professional interests have always been communication and teamwork. After a career as a news reporter, she moved to corporate communication, where she was involved in large scale change initiatives and technology implementations in the BMO/Bank of Montreal IT division. A professional coach and coach trainer when she learned about the agile movement, Sue now trains coaches for the agile workplace. Sue authored Talk to Me: Workplace Conversations That Work. Learn more about Sue at itsunderstood.com.

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Shyam Kumar

Shyam Kumar currently serves as a Principal Agile Consultant at UST-Global.  He has helped multiple teams and programs adopt and improve upon their agile practices, in Scrum, Kanban and SAFe, at both the team and program levels including co-located as well as distributed teams. He is a CSM, CSP0, SPC and an Innovation Games Certified Collaboration Architect. Shyam is also actively engaged with Agile New England, a non-profit agile user group, dedicated to accelerating the adoption of agile throughout the New England region.

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Philip Lew

After working in various management and technical positions in software development and product management, Philip Lew leads XBOSoft’s direction and strategy as CEO. A speaker at numerous trade and academic conferences, Phil has worked with hundreds of organizations to assess the quality of their software, examine software quality processes, and set forth measurement plans to improve software quality using systematic methods. His Ph.D. research in software quality and usability resulted in several IEEE and ACM journal publications and in various trade journals as well. Find out more about Philip at xbosoft.com.

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Doc List Enterprises
Doc List

Doc List has spent much of his thirty-five years in the software development community in leadership and coaching roles. Doc’s education in clinical and industrial/organizational psychology has contributed to his understanding of language and interaction between people. Roles as agile coach, facilitator, and trainer have brought the importance of language and interaction into finer focus, as has his blog at doclist.me. Doc's experience as a leader, trainer, coach, presenter, facilitator, and professional speaker blends into an unusual appreciation for and mastery of the subtlety of spoken and written language, as well as the power of human interaction in various forms.

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Ultimate Software
Mike Longin

Mike Longin is a certified ScrumMaster, agile coach, and manager of software engineering at Ultimate Software. For more than ten years, Mike has helped pioneer agile implementations of Scrum, kanban, and Scrumban for the Ultimate’s enterprise needs. As part of these efforts, he has led a metrics-first approach to agile leadership, letting the data lead the team—not the other way around. Mike has developed web automation tools that combine agile principles with automation needs, culminating as co-lead on the Simple Web Automation Toolkit project.

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Larry Maccherone

Larry Maccherone is an industry-recognized leader in lean, agile, metrics, and visualization. As director of analytics and research at AgileCraft, Larry’s passion for analytics and visualization is helping AgileCraft be the best way to scale agile. Previously at Rally Software, he led the Insights product line which enabled better decisions with data, leveraging big data techniques to conduct ground-breaking research and offer the first-ever agile performance benchmarking capability. Before Rally, Larry worked at the Software Engineering Institute for seven years, conducting research on software engineering metrics with a focus on reintroducing quantitative insight back into the lean and agile communities.

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Michael Mah

With twenty-five years of industry experience Michael Mah teaches, writes, and consults for QSM Associates to tech companies on measuring and estimating software projects for offshore, waterfall, and agile. Michael and his QSM partners have researched thousands of projects worldwide. His work examines time-pressure dynamics of teams and their contribution to project success and failure. Michael’s clients include Boeing, Progressive, Verizon Wireless, Nationwide, JPMorgan Chase, and other Fortune 100 companies. He is the director of the Benchmarking Practice at the Cutter Consortium in the United States. A private pilot, Michael lives in the mountains of western Massachusetts. Reach Michael at qsma.com.

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Geoff Meyer

As director of SW Test and DevOps for Dell.com, Geoff Meyer leads the definition and implementation of the Agile Scrum Software Test processes, test automation strategy, and the adoption of continuous delivery practices for Dell’s eCommerce site. A seventeen-year veteran of Dell, Geoff’s roles have spanned the software development spectrum including test architect, program manager, software manager, and developer. Geoff has been an active member of the Agile Austin community since 2010.

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Andrew Montcrieff

A senior principal software engineer with more than twenty-five years of developing data protection software solutions for Veritas, Andrew Montcrieff currently serves as the ScrumMaster for the team focused on support for VMware Virtual Machines in the Backup Exec product line. Andy’s development expertise spans the gamut from the early days of cassette tape drives on DOS-based desktops to protecting your critical data in the cloud. He enjoys using his skills to help solve the difficult problems that challenge today’s software development teams. Contact Andy at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @AgileBitFlipper.

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Mario Moreira

Mario Moreira is a VP of client engagement and agile consultant with Emergn Ltd., focusing on business success by increasing value of products, optimizing flow for faster delivery, and increasing quality through customer feedback. With a CSM and CSP, he has Scrum, XP, and kanban experience in enterprise-level agile transformations, coaching, and team building. Mario authored Being Agile—Your Roadmap to Successful Adoption, Adapting Configuration Management for Agile Teams, Software Configuration Management Implementation Roadmap, and Agile for Dummies. He writes on his blog at Agile Adoption Roadmap.

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Becky Moshenek

Becky Moshenek is a certified ScrumMaster for ANCILE, a provider of best-in-class learning and performance support software. She currently works on ANCILE’s largest and most complex product which is used by Fortune 100 companies for their enterprise-wide training and productivity software. As ANCILE progresses from waterfall to agile, Becky provides support for the quality assurance and development teams. She has more than fifteen years of professional experience with the software development lifecycle, working with both large government infrastructures and smaller start-up projects. Becky also runs a local gym franchise in South Carolina with her husband, Michael.

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Bob Payne

Bob Payne is the VP of enterprise consulting at LitheSpeed. An early adopter of Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, and SAFe, he has worked exclusively as a lean+agile transformation leader since 1999. Bob brings a pragmatic approach to the use of “best fit” approaches from across the spectrum of practices and processes. He believes that the most important piece of any transformation is to grow the skills in the teams to build and create a culture of continuous improvement. Bob is founder and chair of the AgileDC conference, speaks at industry conferences worldwide, hosts the AgileToolkit podcast and has produced more than 170 podcasts.

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Jeffery Payne

Jeffery Payne is CEO and founder of Coveros, Inc., a software company that builds secure software applications using agile methods. Since its inception in 2008, Coveros has become a market leader in secure agile principles and recognized by Inc. magazine as one of the fastest growing private companies in the country. Prior to founding Coveros, Jeffery was chairman of the board, CEO, and co-founder of Cigital, Inc., a market leader in software security consulting. He has published more than thirty papers on software development and testing, and testified before Congress on issues of national importance, including intellectual property rights, cyber terrorism, and software quality.

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Geoff Perlman

Founder and CEO of Xojo, Inc., makers of Xojo, Geoff Perlman started his adventure into software development on a VAX mainframe when he was ten years old. Since then, Geoff has worked for companies as large as AT&T and as small as a one-man shop. While working in Silicon Valley, he authored a book on database development and taught programming to thousands of people. For most of his career, Geoff has been running companies he founded, always focused on finding the simplest way to solve complex problems.

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TechWell Corp.
Dale Perry

Dale Perry has more than thirty-eight years of experience in information technology as a programmer/analyst, database administrator, project manager, development manager, tester, and test manager. Dale’s project experience includes large-system development and conversions, distributed systems, and both web-based and client/server applications. A professional instructor for more than twenty-four years, he has presented at numerous industry conferences on development and testing. With TechWell for nineteen years, Dale has specialized in training and consulting on testing (test design and planning), inspections and reviews, and other testing and quality-related topics.

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Jeff Pierce

Jeff Pierce has more than 20 years of experience in software engineering management, specializing in program, project, and software quality assurance management. Jeff is also experienced in building technical teams that are rapidly able to implement solutions and deliver business value. More recently, Jeff has focused on Agile project management and, as a certified Agile ScrumMaster, has coached and mentored several client companies over the last 10 years in successfully introducing Agile practices and methodologies as part of their Agile adoption and quality software delivery.

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Ken Pugh

A fellow consultant with Net Objectives, Ken Pugh helps companies transform into lean-agile organizations through training and coaching. His special interests are in communication (particularly effectively communicating requirements), delivering business value, and using lean principles to deliver high quality quickly. Ken trains, mentors, and testifies on technology topics from object-oriented design to Linux/Unix. He has written several programming books, including the 2006 Jolt Award winner Prefactoring and his latest Lean-Agile Acceptance Test Driven Development: Better Software Through Collaboration. Ken has helped clients from London to Boston to Sydney to Beijing to Hyderabad. He enjoys snowboarding, windsurfing, biking, and hiking the Appalachian Trail. Reach Ken at [email protected]

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Perry Reinert

Perry Reinert is the director of agile strategy at Infusionsoft. As a CSM and CSPO, Perry strives to bring new agile techniques and approaches to Infusionsoft development teams, and more recently to other non-development departments. A frequent speaker on agile topics both internationally and at local events, Perry co-founded, and still runs, the Phoenix Scrum User’s Group. Prior to Infusionsoft, Perry taught classes at Arizona State University, launched rockets at Orbital Sciences Corporation, and worked with Cisco Systems on large-scale e-learning projects. As a consultant, Perry has taught and coached agile in numerous companies. Reach Perry at [email protected].

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Jared Richardson

Principal consultant and a member of the core team at Agile Artisans, Jared Richardson is a process coach who works with software teams to help them build excellent software. He sold his first software program in 1991 and has been immersed in software ever since. He helped create the GROWS methodology and has authored a number of books, including the best selling Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects and Career 2.0: Take Control of Your Life. He is a frequent speaker at software conferences and a thought leader in the agile space. Jared lives with his wife and children in North Carolina where they, quite by accident, became backyard chicken farmers.

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Justin Riservato

An integral part of Gilt’s growth since 2009, Justin Riservato has worked with just about every team and department. Justin has developed a direct, tell the truth approach and philosophy to project communication that has improved both collaboration and trust across teams. From his past life of living and working on sailboats, Justin has been able to draw numerous parallels between program management and working on a ship—at least the way he does it.

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Rob Sabourin

Rob Sabourin, P. Eng., has more than thirty-four years of management experience leading teams of software development professionals. A well-respected member of the software engineering community, Rob has managed, trained, mentored, and coached hundreds of top professionals in the field. He frequently speaks at conferences and writes on software engineering, SQA, testing, management, and internationalization. Rob wrote I am a Bug!, the popular software testing children's book; works as an adjunct professor of software engineering at McGill University; and serves as the principle consultant (and president/janitor) of AmiBug.Com, Inc. Contact Rob at [email protected].

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Adam Satterfield

Adam Satterfield is VP of QA at BetterCloud, which provides intelligent data security, automated management, and critical insights for cloud office platforms. A 16-year veteran of the Atlanta tech scene, he specializes in teaching teams to function in an Agile environment. In his spare time, he enjoys karate and blacksmithing in his home forge.

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Ultimate Software
Prateek Singh

Prateek Singh has been leading and working on agile teams for the past ten years. Starting with XP, then Scrum, and now kanban, Prateek has gained a breadth and depth of knowledge regarding agile techniques, practices, and implementation principles. At Ultimate Software, he conducts training and coaching for teams regarding kanban and lean principles. In his career, Prateek has played the role of software engineer, ScrumMaster, and manager of software engineering.

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Michael Sowers

Michael Sowers, CIO and senior consultant at TechWell, has more than twenty-five years of practical experience as a global quality and test leader of internationally distributed test teams across multiple industries. Mike is a senior consultant, skilled in working with both large and small organizations to improve their software development, testing, and delivery approaches. He has worked with companies including Fidelity Investments, PepsiCo, FedEx, Southwest Airlines, Wells Fargo, ADP, and Lockheed to improve software quality, reduce time to market, and decrease costs. With his passion for helping teams deliver software faster, better, and cheaper, Mike has mentored and coached senior software leaders, small teams, and direct contributors worldwide.

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Swift Ascent, LLC
Steve Spearman

A founder and principal at Swift Ascent, LLC, Steve Spearman is a Certified Scrum Trainer and an agile coach working at the enterprise and team levels. Steve has more than thirty years’ experience in corporate software development as a software developer, architect, project manager, ScrumMaster, and multiple management positions in a variety of enterprises. For the past four years, Steve has been providing agile-focused training and coaching to companies from late-stage startups to large corporations. Find out more about Steve on LinkedIn.

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Pivotal
Ryan Tang

Ryan Tang is an engineering manager on the Cloud Foundry team at Pivotal, where he is very interested in practices that foster a happy and productive workplace for talented technologists. Throughout his career—including time at VMware, Deloitte Consulting, and two biotech start-ups—Ryan has worked in a variety of software development environments ranging from large-scale waterfall to extreme programming. By day, he develops software and runs DevOps for distributed cloud systems. In his personal professional growth time, Ryan seeks to understand why agile works and why it seems to encourage a better culture for talented technologists.

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Satish Thatte

Satish Thatte is an agile/lean coach and product consultant at VersionOne. He has fifteen years of software development and management experience at Texas Instruments, Bellcore, LG Electronics, and start-up companies in a variety of agile roles. Satish is a SAFe Program Consultant, Certified ScrumMaster, Certified Scrum Product Owner, and Certified Scrum Practitioner. He specializes in tailoring agile-lean methods to individual organizations (one size doesn’t fit all) and scaling up agile methods your way. Learn more about Satish at LinkedIn.

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Erik van Veenendaal

A leading international consultant, trainer, and recognized expert in software testing, Erik van Veenendaal (erikvanveenendaal.nl) is the founder of Improve Quality Services BV, a company that specializes in testing, requirements engineering, and quality management. Erik is the author of a number of books and papers, a core developer of the TMap testing methodology and the TMMi improvement model, a participant in the International Requirements Engineering Board working parties, currently on the TMMi Foundation board, and a frequent speaker at international testing conferences. For his major contribution to the field of testing, Erik received the 2007 European Testing Excellence Award.

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Francie Van Wirkus

A conqueror of mediocrity, Francie Van Wirkus is a lean agile coach in the insurance and financial services industry, helping people take sustainable steps toward their goals. Her innovative ways of leading and sustaining change have helped lead a large IT transformation effort. Francie is a certified coach, keynote speaker, author, and host of CL&I Radio, an internal corporate radio show focused on all things continuous learning and improvement. Her next challenge is co-hosting Agile Bettys, a fun, motivational podcast about living an agile lifestyle. Francie enjoys racing in Ironman competitions and lives in Wisconsin with her husband and three delightful children.

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Viktor Veis

A software engineering manager with Visual Studio, Viktor Veis focuses on telemetry and data-driven engineering. Viktor built the Visual Studio telemetry team from the ground up and drives transformation to agile data-driven culture across Visual Studio feature engineering teams. He has led performance strategy in Bing where a few milliseconds in page load time results in big changes in revenue. Viktor has experience in v1 projects such as Photosynth, establishing a performance culture from the beginning. Viktor was previously a developer in several small companies on both sides of the Atlantic, building entire application stacks including firmware, communication protocols, APIs, and user experience. Read Viktor’s blog.

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Brian Watson

Brian Watson has more than eighteen years of experience in software development and ten years practicing agile. He is currently a product and agile coach, primarily focusing on agile transformation, coaching, and teaching. Brian has supported enterprise clients across multiple industries including government, insurance, utilities, consulting services, financial services, and manufacturing. Previously, he was a PMO and director of project delivery for a consulting company. Brian is a member of the Scrum Alliance, PMI, and IIBA. When not coaching, Brian enjoys golfing and drinking craft beer.

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Timothy Wise

An enterprise agile coach with LeadingAgile, Tim Wise is a leader specializing in complex agile transformations that involve and impact entire organizations from the C-Suite to the QA analyst. Tim’s passion emerged around the visualization of businesses as interdependent disciplines where sales, marketing, product, and IT all weave together successful stories. He introduces change iteratively to large organizations to align businesses around common goals to impact the lives of people and improve the outcomes of organizations. Sought for his strategy, coaching, and coding abilities, Tim runs the Atlanta Scrum community that hosts a variety of speakers at scrumatlanta.org.

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ImprovAgility
Jody Wood

A professional actor, facilitator, and trainer for almost thirty years, Jody Wood has worked in theater, film, television, and radio—with improvisation at the root of his work. Fifteen years ago, he began conducting workshops, based on the mindset and practices of improvisational theater, to train teams, managers, and executives to improve their abilities to create, collaborate, communicate, lead, and respond positively to change. Jody brings his experience and skill to ImprovAgility, using improv techniques to train individuals and teams to “Be Agile.”

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ImprovAgility
Robie Wood

With more than thirty-one years’ experience as a business leader, program manager, and information technology practitioner, Robie Wood specializes in information technology program strategy and delivery with emphasis on building and leading strong agile teams and organizations. Robie has served as a ScrumMaster, release train engineer, agile transformation leader, agile coach, and agile trainer. His clients have included federal, state, and county governments and commercial entities in the financial and physical security industries. Visit Robie at ImprovAgility.com and follow ImprovAgility @ImprovAgility.

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