Speaker Index

Chief strategy officer Wayne Ariola leads the development and execution of Parasoft’s long-term strategy. Wayne has contributed to the design of core Parasoft technologies and has been awarded several patents for his inventions. He is a recognized leader on service virtualization, API quality, quality policy governance, and application security. Wayne brings more than twenty years of strategic consulting experience in the technology and software development industries.

James Bach is founder and principal consultant of Satisfice, Inc., a software testing and quality assurance company. In the eighties, James cut his teeth as a programmer, tester, and SQA manager in Silicon Valley in the world of market-driven software development. For nearly fifteen years, he has traveled the world teaching rapid software testing skills and serving as an expert witness on court cases involving software testing.

Richard Bender has over forty-five years experience in software with a primary focus on quality assurance and testing. He has consulted internationally to large and small corporations, government agencies, and the military. Richard’s work has included a wide variety of application classes and technology bases from embedded systems to super computer-based systems—and everything in between—consulting to both vendors and IT departments alike.

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.

Hans Buwalda has been working with information technology since his high school years. In his career, Hans has gained experience as a developer, manager, and principal consultant for companies and organizations worldwide. He was a pioneer of the keyword approach to testing and automation, now widely used throughout the industry. His approaches to testing, like Action Based Testing and Soap Opera Testing, have helped a variety of customers achieve scalable and maintainable solutions for large and complex testing challenges.

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 Software Quality Engineering, 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.

Catherine Cruz Agosto has found her software engineering experience at Baxter Healthcare and Insitu (a subsidiary of Boeing) to be an excellent foundation for finding more effective and user-friendly approaches to complex technical problems.

An IT practitioner with a background in a wide variety of technologies, Jeremy Faircloth has experience managing technical teams at multiple Fortune 50 companies. Described as a "Renaissance man of IT" with more than twenty years of real-world IT experience, Jeremy has become an expert in many areas including web development, database administration, enterprise security, network design, large enterprise applications, and project management.

Stephen Frein is a director of quality assurance at Comcast, where his team is responsible for the quality of various high-profile web properties, including Comcast.com. As an adjunct professor at Drexel University, Stephen delivers soporific lectures on database development and IT management at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. For fifteen years he has been leading development and testing teams—occasionally well—mostly by dint of accidents he cannot reliably replicate.

As director of consultancy for Hitachi Consulting, Julie Gardiner provides consultancy and training in all aspects of testing, management, and agile, and specializes in risk, test management, and usability. Julie has more than twenty years of experience as a developer, DBA, project manager, head of operations management, and head of R&D.

In software testing for over forty years, Dorothy Graham is coauthor of four books—Software Inspection, Software Test Automation, Foundations of Software Testing and Experiences of Test Automation—and is currently working with Seretta Gamba on a new book on a test automation patterns wiki. A popular and entertaining speaker at conferences and seminars worldwide, Dot has attended STAR conferences since the first one in 1992.

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.

Parimala Hariprasad spent her youth studying people and philosophy, and in the workplace she applied her learnings to helping create skilled testers. Parimala has been a tester for more than eleven years in domains of CRM, security, e-commerce, and healthcare. Her expertise lies in test coaching, test delivery excellence, and creating great teams that ultimately fire her because they become self-sufficient. Parimala has experienced the transition from web to mobile and emphasizes the need for design thinking in testing.

Matthew Heusser specializes in software delivery consulting—moving projects to done-done faster. But Matt may be best known for his writing, including serving as lead editor for How to Reduce the Cost of Software Testing. A member of the board of directors of the Association for Software Testing, Matt was the lead organizer of Test Coach Camp, the Workshop on Technical Debt.

Richard is the president of Accentient, a company that helps software teams develop better products by leveraging Microsoft's ALM tools and Scrum. He is a Microsoft Regional Director, a Visual Studio ALM MVP, a Professional Scrum Trainer, and author of Professional Scrum Development with Microsoft Visual Studio by Microsoft Press. As a software developer and consultant with over 30 years of experience, he understands that software is built by people and not by processes or tools.

As the director of SPR Companies’ quality practice, Nancy Kastl provides leadership for the onshore testing team in Chicago with a mission to retool and provide jobs for unemployed citizens, veterans, and individuals with disabilities. Nancy has more than twenty-five years of experience as a consultant, director, facilitator, and instructor in software quality and testing. As an entrepreneur and consultant, she brings her expertise to management teams in strategic planning, quality management, software testing, process re-engineering, and program management offices.

Test advisor at Professional Testing, Bart Knaack has more than twenty years of experience in testing and test management. Bart has contributed to testing projects and processes in roles of test manager, test data management team lead, and process improvement agent. He has coached testers, built up test teams, and developed processes in test, test support, and overall quality management and improvement. Bart is a frequent speaker at conferences, universities, and colleges.

Senior QA manager for Royal Bank of Canada Joe Larizza focuses on online and mobile application testing for banking and investment systems. During his career, Joe has undertaken strategic initiatives including the expansion of testing programs and establishment of testing standards and procedures, implementation of a quality metrics program, and implementation of automated testing. He previously was senior QA manager for CPP Investment Board; director, QA for Loblaw Companies Inc.; and senior manager, QA with RBC Dexia.

An evaluator of QA tools and technology (“cool QA stuff”), Bryan Linder has more than twenty-one years of experience in quality assurance and control in roles from enterprise QA tools architect through director of QA. Bryan has extensive expertise implementing solutions to streamline the testing process. One highlight was leading an agile effort to integrate the latest test tools from IBM, Microsoft, and Hewlett Packard in a highly regulated environment.

Claire Lohr has been an active professional in the computer field for thirty years, with the last twenty years emphasizing software process improvement and testing. Claire provides training—design, authoring, and instruction—and consulting services for a wide variety of both government and commercial clients. She is a Lloyd’s Register trained ISO 9000 Lead Auditor and has been trained to perform Software Capability Evaluations for the SW-CMM.

Wilson Mar has been building and bringing enterprise applications to market on all major enterprises—from mobile to mainframe clouds—as an architect, developer, performance tester, and manager. His website (wilsonmar.com) provides concise, in-depth advice on leading technologies, especially on LoadRunner and performance engineering.

Chris Mauck is a principal QA engineer who focuses on framework design, software testing, and development through automation. With more than fifteen years of software testing and automation experience, he has trained and coached many engineers on how to effectively leverage automation. Chris has experience as a test manager for a team of automation engineers based in the US and India. He and his team were able to develop a corporate-wide automation solution leveraging Java, .NET, and Selenium.

As BioWare’s director of development QA and quality engineering, Tulay McNally is responsible for strategic planning, organizing, directing, and coaching QA teams with a focus on QA managers and leads. With the other studio department and project leaders, Tulay’s goal is to ensure the projects’ and the studio’s success while anticipating future trends and technologies. She is a certified ScrumMaster and Certified PO. Tulay previously worked for Microsoft, Alias Systems, CG Channel, Square Enix, and SEGA.

Meenakshi Muthukumaran is a test automation strategist and consultant with Assurance Services Unit of Tata Consultancy Services. Meena advises customers on product selection, deployment, and effective use of static testing tools, and leads the professional research team that evaluates and grades different static testing tools. She started her career as a software developer and worked in the United States for several years in technology and management roles.

Although he had never spoken in public before 2014, Declan O’Riordan set goals of being accepted as a speaker for EuroSTAR, winning the prize for best conference paper, and having his talk voted the session that attendees would most like repeated. He achieved these goals and joined the 2015 EuroSTAR programme committee. Declan says his success was a result of taking on security testing and making it an integral part of the whole SDLC on all projects on which he was test manager.

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 was recognized by Inc. magazine as one of the fastest growing private US companies. Prior to founding Coveros, Jeffery was chairman of the board, CEO, and cofounder of Cigital, Inc., a market leader in software security consulting.

Martin Pol has played a significant role in raising the awareness and improving the performance of testing worldwide. Martin is experienced in managing testing

Ryan Riehle is a technical consultant, strategist, coach, and trainer who is enthusiastic about improving software quality and reducing costs using lean and agile methodologies. As a senior consultant with InCycle Software, Ryan constantly drives and assists software teams and businesses to improve their Application Lifecycle Management practices. He is a seasoned .Net and SQL Server database developer, an MCITP for TFS and SQL Server, and a Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (ALM).  Contact Ryan @MisterReally. 

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.

A hardware engineer for nine years and a software tester for the past five, Jeff Sikkink is the QA lead for automation on an international product that ties automation tools from several different teams to allow testing of multiple products in an automated fashion end to end. Jeff focuses on getting teams to break down the walls between QA and software development, encouraging both to collaborate on automation and to see the long term benefits.

Mike Sowers 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.

A QA director at ChannelAdvisor in Morrisville, NC, Mary Thorn has a broad testing background that spans automation, data warehouses, and web-based systems in a wide variety of technologies and testing techniques. During her more than seventeen years of experience in healthcare, HR, financial, and SaaS-based products, Mary has held manager and contributor level positions in software development organizations. A strong leader in agile testing methodologies, she has direct experience leading teams through agile adoption and beyond.

“Less talk, more rock” are words Joel Tosi likes to live by. Instead of telling teams what to do, he prefers to pair with organizations and teams to create meaningful products. Whether working with product owners on product learning, testing teams trying to balance automation, or developers and operations teams interested in continuous delivery, Joel enjoys rolling up his sleeves to work with the teams. Sharing his experiences as a coach, architect, developer, and manager, he is a hands-on collaborator and community builder.

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.