Speaker Index

Jason Arbon is the CEO of AppDiff.com, focused on automagically identifying differences in mobile app UI, UX, and performance. Jason is also the creator of the new mobile web search and discovery app mobo (herecandy.com). Jason was formerly the director of engineering and director of product at Applause.com/uTest.com, where he created the App Store data analytics service and led overall product strategy to deliver crowdtesting to top app teams via more than 100,000 community members. Jason previously held engineering management and innovation roles at Google and Microsoft. He coauthored How Google Tests Software and authored App Quality: Secrets for Agile App Teams.

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.

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.

Edwin is a Technology practitioner in Deloitte, Quality Assurance Community of Practice. He has extensive experience in all phases of SDLC, with PMI PMP and QAI CSTE credentials. He has about ten years of consulting experience in the delivery of complex implementation projects in the Financial Services Industry, including major banks and financial institutions in Canada and the United States. With his deep knowledge in QA and Testing, he has been in a variety of Test Lead roles in different types of client engagements. Edwin is knowledgeable of the latest trend in performance testing and automation of cloud solutions with emphasis in Agile/Lean Project Management methodology.

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.

As director of product strategy at QASymphony, Kevin Dunne works closely with customers and thought leaders to help produce the next generation of exploratory testing tools. Kevin is passionate about agile and specifically about exploratory testing and its ability to help foster cross-functional communication and collaboration between all areas of the engineering organization. In a previous role, he was responsible for customer success for QASymphony where he was able to participate in and observe several successful exploratory testing implementations. Prior to joining QASymphony, Kevin managed testing teams at Deloitte, working on projects for large Fortune 500 and government customers.

Robin Goldsmith, JD, is author of Discovering REAL Business Requirements for Software Project Success, numerous articles and featured presentations, and the Proactive Testing, Proactive SQA, REAL ROI, and Beyond the Textbook Software Acquisition methodologies. A subject expert on requirements and testing for TechTarget’s SearchSoftwareQuality.com and a subject expert and reviewer for the IIBA Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK v2), Robin works directly with and trains business and systems professionals in requirements analysis, quality and testing, software acquisition, project management and leadership, metrics, ROI, and process improvement. Reach Robin at gopromanagement.com or [email protected].

A Cloud-y PaaS and SaaS architect since the turn of the century, Chris Haddad is an Apache Stratos and Cloud architecture aficionado who has worked with clients to deploy innovative ecosystem PaaS environments. Chris has led many successful startup software teams who operated as the solution provider of choice. He has advised Fortune 500/Global 2000 organizations on cloud native software strategies, roadmaps, and best practices. Chris is an accomplished author and speaker whose goal is to make you and your team successful.

Michael Harris has more than thirty years of broad management experience in the IT field—in R&D, development, production, business, and academia—and held numerous senior executive positions in Fortune 500 companies. An author and speaker on a range of topics related to the value visualization of IT, Michael is considered a leader in the software development industry. He became president, CEO, and majority owner of David Consulting Group (DCG) in 2006. Michael is a co-author of The Business Value of IT: Managing Risks, Optimizing Performance, and Measuring Results. Read more at valuevisualization.com.

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.

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.

John Krewson (@johnkrewson) is the agile transformation lead at MasterCard and a consultant whose expertise is based on real-world experience rather than regurgitated dogma. His communication skills, patience, and agile experience blend into a unique style that is both approachable and entertaining. Since he still hasn't found the silver bullet to eliminate all the complexities of software development, John continues to challenge organizations to improve their delivery of customer value through the application of agile principles and practices. Before his time with MasterCard, John was an agile consultant with VersionOne. In a prior life, John was a professional actor who, among other credits, appeared on Saturday Night Live. Read John's blog at ItemsOnTheLeft.com.

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.

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.

Judith Mills is interested in people. Rising through the ranks from software engineer to VP Development at a global software company, Judith is equally comfortable talking with teams about building great applications as she is working on organizational strategy in the boardroom. Her interest in people and her desire to create great work environments where people can thrive and do their best drive her to continually learn more and seek new opportunities to effect change. Judith has worked with leadership teams and implemented Scrum and kanban for hundreds of teams on three continents.

At SAS Institute Carl Nagle is a principal software developer, focused for the past seventeen years on the development, integration, and evolution of enterprise software test automation tools and the open source SAFSDEV framework. For more than thirty years, Carl has been responsible for engineering both hardware and software testing systems including the design of advanced electronics for analog and digital subsystem testing with embedded software for high-end power generation and communication systems. This naturally evolved into the development of advanced software testing systems and frameworks. Carl and his team thrive on solving “impossible” test automation scenarios across multiple processes, platforms, and technologies.

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.

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.

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]

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.

For almost a decade, Max Saperstone has been a test engineer focusing on test automation and the continuous integration/continuous delivery process. Max specializes in open source tools—Selenium, JMeter, AutoIT, Cucumber, and Chef. He has led several testing automation efforts, including developing an automated suite focused on web-based software to operate over several applications. Max also headed a major project developing an automated testing structure to run Cucumber tests over multiple test interfaces and environments, while developing a system to keep test data “ageless.” He is currently developing a new testing architecture for SecureCI to allow testing of multiple interfaces, custom reporting, and minimal test upkeep.

Jatinder Singh has ten years of IT consulting experience—seven years as a quality assurance lead in banking, retail, and health-care domains; and three years as a test data management (TDM) engineer in healthcare. Part of the Dell TDM Team at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Jatinder has worked as test data lead on two major projects requiring continuous test data delivery.

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.

Thomas Vaniotis has more than ten years of experience as a tester, developer, and product analyst. At NYC-based institutional brokerage Liquidnet, Thomas is the product manager for internal and external customer tools that manage multiple complex trading applications. He is interested in data-driven business analysis, customer-experience design, exploratory testing, and the theory of software creation. Thomas’ background in music and philosophy gives him a unique perspective on the world of finance and technology. He has previously spoken at STARCANADA and CAST, and tweets @tvaniotis.