Agile Dev East 2017 - Conference Speakers | TechWell

Conference archive

Conference Speakers

Josh Anderson
Broadvine

With four large-scale agile transformations under his belt, Josh Anderson has seen it all—good agile, bad agile, and other things sometimes referred to as agile. As the VP of product development at Broadvine, Josh is responsible for the company’s agile adoption and all aspects of software engineering. He gives back...Read more

Ray Arell
nuAgility, LLC

The founder and owner of nuAgility, LLC, Ray Arell has enjoyed a thirty-year career, dedicated to building great teams, communities, and products. Ray has directly built and transformed a number of worldwide organizations, and for the past five years he has been coaching other leaders to do the same with...Read more

Wayne Ariola
Tricentis

Known for his efforts to promote continuous testing, Wayne Ariola has contributed to the design of many innovative technologies and received several patents for his inventions. A recognized leader on topics such as service virtualization, SOA and API quality, software quality governance, and application security, Wayne is a frequent contributor...Read more

Sanjiv Augustine
LitheSpeed

Sanjiv Augustine is the president of LitheSpeed, an agile consulting, training, and product development company. With 25+ years in the industry, Sanjiv has managed agile projects from five to more than 100 people, trained thousands of agile practitioners through workshops and conference presentations, and coached numerous project teams....Read more

Arlen Bankston
LitheSpeed

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...Read more

Steve Berczuk
Fitbit

A principal engineer at Fitbit, Steve Berczuk leads a quality infrastructure and engineering team which builds tools and provides coaching to help teams deliver features effectively. Steve is a software developer and manager who is passionate about helping teams deliver effectively by helping to solve technical, process, and people management...Read more

Thena Berry
Davita

Thena Berry is a manager of BA at Davita. In her twenty year career as a technical communicator, Thena has worked across multiple industries. In every endeavor she focuses on building effective processes for getting the right information to the right person at the right time.Read more

Jennifer_Bonine
tap|QA

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...Read more

Rob Burkett
Buckle Down & Grind

Rob Burkett has more than twenty-five years of experience across business operations and IT, with the last thirteen in project/program management roles. Rob has worked across healthcare, airline, and transportation verticals. He holds the PMI’s Project Management Professional certification and is a Certified ScrumMaster. Recently, Rob has moved into coaching,...Read more

Tom Chavez
Splunk

Tom Chavez has more than twenty years of experience as a manager and product manager in the software development tools field. Tom works in product marketing to developers at Splunk, the leader in operational intelligence. Tom has worked across Silicon Valley at Apple, Sun, PalmSource, and Intuit, delivering tools for...Read more

Gene Chorba
Ionic Security

Gene Chorba is the head of the developer relations program at Ionic Security, an Atlanta-based security startup focused on encryption. Gene is a partner with Covello, and the founder and director of HackGSU. An award-winning hacker and developer, Gene is world-recognized as a voice in security and has become a...Read more

Linda Cook
Project Cooks

Concurrent Sessions

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 which allows her to tackle the most complex organizational challenges....Read more

Anthony Crain
Blue Agility, LLC

Since 1999, Anthony Crain has led 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 of theoretical concepts in an exciting and actionable manner. A dynamic speaker who energizes his audience, Anthony has...Read more

Roland Cuellar
LitheSpeed

For the past twelve years, Roland Cuellar (kway-are) has focused exclusively on agile software development and lean business process improvement. During that time, he has worked on enterprise agile adoption with clients including Capital One, CNBC, Westinghouse Nuclear Power, Nationwide Insurance, US Citizenship and Immigration, and the US Courts. Roland...Read more

Logan Daigle
VersionOne

A DevOps Coach with VersionOne, Logan Daigle has been providing and implementing DevOps solutions since 2011. He has experience in development and DevOps in the military, government, healthcare, retail, and finance industries. Logan is passionate about being agile, doing DevOps well, and using agile engineering practices to build, test, and...Read more

Jeff Dalton
Broadsword Solutions

Jeff Dalton is president of Broadsword, a different kind of performance innovation firm that helps engineering and software organizations get better at what they do. He is also chief evangelist at AgileCxO.org (@agilecxo), an agile leadership research and development organization that builds performance models, training, and certifications for...Read more

David Dang
Zenergy Technologies

VP of automated solutions for Zenergy Technologies David Dang has been a leading figure in the test automation industry for more than eighteen years. At Zenergy, David spearheads test automation by developing advanced frameworks that emphasize reusability and reduce maintenance efforts. An expert in commercial automation tools and open-source toolsets,...Read more

Garren DiPasquale
Artifact

Garren DiPasquale’s experience with the design process leads to identifying problems and developing creative solutions that serve a purpose. His process and creative thinking skills have allowed him to design and develop innovative applications and user experiences for clients, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Lowe’s, Muzak, and Chick-fil-A. When...Read more

Korey Earl
ThoughtWorks

Concurrent Sessions

Korey Earl is a senior consultant at ThoughtWorks where he has worked on several Docker and infrastructure automation projects. He has presented and given workshops on Docker and infrastructure as code. In the IT Industry since 2000, Korey has done everything from running network cables and administering servers to authoring...Read more

Leon Fayer
OmniTI

A senior technology executive with two decades of experience in technical and business operations, Leon Fayer has expertise around architecting and operating complex systems and defining approaches to maximize technical decisions' value. Through the years, Leon has had a unique opportunity to design and build systems that run some of...Read more

Stephen Frein
Comcast

Stephen Frein is a senior director of software engineering at Comcast. He previously managed high profile software projects for the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Treasury. For two decades, he has been leading development and testing teams to questionable success by dint of accidents he cannot reliably replicate....Read more

Heather Fullen
Infinite Energy

For more than a decade, Heather Fullen has worked in the areas of business analysis, project management, and testing, with teams delivering custom software solutions in the energy industry. She has also worked with several teams transitioning from plan-driven approaches to agile practices, helping teams and their members work through...Read more

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies

An agile methodologist, practitioner, and coach, Bob Galen helps guide leaders and teams in their pragmatic adoption and organizational shift toward Scrum and other agile methods. Bob is often called “a Coach of Coaches” because of his deep and broad experience in the agile arena. He is director, agile practices...Read more

Sumedha Ganjoo
National Instruments

At National Instruments Sumedha Ganjoo manages projects for a global operations team that services large software development. She spearheads the continuous delivery effort in her organization. A certified ScrumMaster, Sumedha has worked as a software engineer and project manager in various waterfall and agile projects including open-source and university research...Read more

Max Griffiths
ThoughtWorks

Now a Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks, Max Griffiths started as a shell scripter fulfilling his urge to automate everything. Since then, he’s been eating his way around the world working across multiple business sectors and it’s likely he’s worked at a company just like yours. Although the practice has changed...Read more

Dawn Haynes
PerfTestPlus, Inc.

Dawn Haynes is CEO, testing coach, and consultant for PerfTestPlus, Inc. A highly regarded trainer of software testers, Dawn blends experience with a real-world view to provide testers with tools and techniques to help them generate new approaches to common and complex software testing problems. Passionate about improving the state...Read more

V. Lee Henson
AgileDad

V. Lee Henson is one of only 200 or so Certified Scrum Trainers worldwide. His client list includes more than forty of the Fortune 100 companies and many successful agile implementations. Lee’s unique blend of real-world experience in various roles—combined with his ability to drive home complex concepts—makes him an...Read more

Brian Hicks
Coveros

Brian Hicks is a software engineer, development manager, and technical architect with over 15 years of hands-on experience designing and developing software using core Java, web services, and related technologies in both the commercial and public sectors. He is also a Certified ScrumMaster® and has experience implementing agile processes, leading...Read more

Karen Holliday
Halogen Software

​Karen Holliday ​serves as Vice President, Quality and Customer Advocacy at Saba Software. Karen started out her technology career ​over twenty years ago as a software developer for real time software platforms. Moving into the optical world, Karen developed a passion for solving complex business problems planning nationwide and metro...Read more

Steve Jones
Redgate Software

Steve Jones has been working with databases and computers for more than two decades. He has worked with SQL Server since 1991—from v4.2 through SQL Server 2016. He has been a DBA, developer, and manager in a variety of large and small companies across multiple industries. A founder of SQLServerCentral...Read more

Todd Jones
Westfield Insurance

Todd Jones has spent his entire career with Westfield Insurance—as a developer, architect, testing leader, and project manager, having led dozens of business and technology projects with a proven track record of satisfied sponsors and team members. He led the testing project team for the case study—a $90 MM program...Read more

Siva Katir
PlayFab, Inc.

Siva Katir has more than a dozen years of experience developing cloud, desktop, and mobile systems. Currently he works for PlayFab, a backend-as-a-service for some of the largest video games today, where he wrestles with maintaining near-perfect uptime on a massive scale with a small team. Siva has designed and...Read more

Rob Keefer
POMIET

Rob Keefer is cofounder and innovation director of POMIET, a health-care systems consulting company. He has more than twenty years of experience delivering innovative software solutions and implementing approaches for better human/computer interaction. Since 2003, Rob has been leading agile teams in the development of highly interactive products in more...Read more

Sumit Kumar
Capgemini

Director at Capgemini Sumit Kumar has more than seventeen years of experience in testing delivery, leading testing transformation, and assisting testing organizations adopting changes. In recent years Sumit has worked with various mid- to large-size testing organizations to make them DevOps ready. Sumit works through organizational restructuring, baselining testing maturity,...Read more

James La Spada
Capital One

A technology professional for more than ten years, James La Spada started his career in application development. He is passionate about learning new technologies and innovating to improve efficiency and quality. James broadened his overall IT knowledge by working his way through different areas within technology. His overall career experience...Read more

Greg Law
Undo

Greg Law is the cofounder and CEO of Undo. He is a coder at heart but likes to bridge the gap between the business and software worlds (sadly though, most of his coding these days is done on airplanes). He is happiest working at the OS/application and hardware/software boundaries. With...Read more

Susan Lin
Enable Agile

An agile coach and practitioner with a creative approach and positive attitude, Susan Lin is founder of Enable Agile, a company focused on helping organizations grow and sustain agility long term after the consultants leave. After spending more than ten years working in change management internationally, she started her agile...Read more

Tim Lister
Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc.

Tim Lister is a software consultant at the Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc. where he divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing. Tim is a coauthor with his Guild partners of Adrenalin Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior. With Tom DeMarco he coauthored Waltzing With Bears: Managing...Read more

Catherine Louis
CLL-Group.com

A Certified Scrum Trainer™, independent agile coach, and founder of CLL-Group and PoDojo.com, Catherine Louis has more than twenty years of experience in complex product development. Catherine’s focus is on product discovery and delivery—using design thinking, agile methods, and agile R&D—and managing organizational agile transitions to build speed and flexibility...Read more

Larry Maccherone
Independent Consultant

An industry-recognized thought leader on lean/agile, analytics, and DevSecOps, Larry Maccherone currently serves as Principal for his namesake consulting firm where he has worked with clients like Comcast, IBM, Adobe, Oracle, USAA, and Intuit. Previously at Rally Software, Larry led the insights product line which enabled better decisions with data,...Read more

Wilson Mar
JetBloom

Wilson Mar has been building and bringing enterprise applications to market on major platforms—from mobile to server clouds—as an architect, developer, performance tester, and manager. His website provides concise, in-depth advice on leading technologies. For the past three years, Wilson has been refining his training techniques on Git...Read more

Claudia Marquette
AB2 Consulting

Agile coach and SAFe 4.0 program consultant Claudia Marquette guides IT leaders and professionals to transform how they work using agile and lean practices. She has deep expertise in what it takes to “go Agile” with experience as a SAFe release train engineer. Claudia designs the curriculum for an intensive,...Read more

Steve Martin
Pegasystems

Steve Martin has focused the past decade exclusively as an agile enterprise transformation consultant. He enjoys partnering with all levels of an organization—from C-levels to managers to teams—coaching, mentoring, training, and helping them embrace an agile mindset while implementing a set of tailored practices. In his more than twenty-five years...Read more

Elise McCallum
ThoughtWorks

A senior developer at ThoughtWorks, Elise McCallum helps companies resolve both technical and organizational challenges. She has dabbled in languages ranging from Java to Puppet to Scheme. Elise has a deep interest in Ops and a strong passion for optimizing the development lifecycle and path to production to make delivering...Read more

Sean McKeever
Edgenuity

As director of product management and design at Edgenuity, Sean McKeever has specifically worked with product teams to make the transition from single-track agile to dual-track agile methodologies. Sean has worked in product management for nineteen years in a variety of technology companies, primarily in the K–16 education market. He...Read more

Alexander Mohr
Tricentis

Alexander Mohr joined Tricentis as a service virtualization evangelist and enterprise solution architect. He is responsible for defining strategy, evolving best practices, and helping customers establish and achieve service virtualization goals that advance their business objectives. Alexander has more than sixteen years of experience in the financial and telecom sectors,...Read more

Mario Moreira
Vistaprint

An enterprise agile consultant and master agile coach at Vistaprint, Mario Moreira focuses on company success by increasing value of products, optimizing flow for faster delivery, and increasing quality through customer feedback. He coaches and educates executives, management, and distributed teams. Mario specializes in transforming enterprises to agile and introducing...Read more

Glen Morris
Vectren

At Toyota for the first fifteen years of his career, Glen Morris learned lean software development and became a trainer of lean methodologies. Moving into the utility industry seven years ago, Glen merged the worlds of agile and lean into a comprehensive approach to software development. He now has assisted...Read more

Laura Burke
Ipreo

An enterprise agile coach at financial technology firm Ipreo in Raleigh NC, Laura Olson serves as a release train engineer for a highly-distributed program. She has played a key role in influencing Ipreo’s agile adoption, which has grown from two to more than fifty agile teams in two years. Previously...Read more

Gitte Ottosen
Sogeti Denmark

Gitte Ottosen is a managing consultant at Capgemini-Sogeti Denmark. A career tester, Gitte has twenty-two years of test engineering and test management experience in both traditional and agile contexts. She has worked with test process improvement, first as a test architect/manager at Systematic and more recently as a test coach...Read more

Chris Parlette
ParkMyCLoud

Director of cloud solutions at ParkMyCloud Chris Parlette helps customers reduce their cloud waste and manage their hybrid infrastructures by drawing on his years of experience working at various software start-ups. From SaaS to on-premise, virtualization to cloud, monitoring tools to cloud management platforms, and small businesses to large enterprises,...Read more

Sheetal Patel
The Vanguard Group

A program manager at the Vanguard Group, Sheetal Patel leads a transformational change to modernize how they develop and test software to enable continuous delivery. Sheetal’s team is responsible for bringing contemporary software testing practices to a development staff of more than 1,000 IT professionals. Her team’s mission is to...Read more

Bob Payne
LitheSpeed

Bob Payne is a change agent at LitheSpeed. As an early adopter of Extreme Programming, Scrum, and SAFe, he has worked exclusively as a lean and agile transformation leader since 1999. Bob hosts the Agile Toolkit podcast and has produced more than 170 podcasts, recording a variety of industry leaders...Read more

Jeffery Payne
Coveros, Inc.

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 in 2012 as one of the fastest growing private companies...Read more

Matthew Phillip
ThoughtWorks

Matthew Philip is the director of learning and development at ThoughtWorks. As a coach, trainer, quality advocate, and facilitator, Matt helps organizations and teams become fit for their purpose through continuous learning. He draws on lean and agile values, principles, and practices (kanban method, XP, Scrum) to offer experience, models,...Read more

Ken Pugh
Ken Pugh, Inc.

Ken Pugh helps companies evolve into lean-agile organizations through training and coaching. His special interests are in collaborating on 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...Read more

Niranjalee Rajaratne
Third Bridge

Niranjalee Rajaratne is the head of QA at a London technology company, helping to build an organization to support innovative web product stability. She is a quality evangelist who has spent much of her career concentrating on testing and quality assurance to ensure it is seen as everyone’s responsibility. With...Read more

T.j. Randall
XebiaLabs

T.j. Randall is the street-smart DevOps technologist and business-minded VP behind XebiaLabs’ customer success team. T.j. combines hands-on engineering experience with a passion for studying the intersections of business and technology. At XebiaLabs, he routinely partners with global enterprises such as GE and Digital Globe to implement successful DevOps strategies....Read more

Mark Richards
Independent Consultant
Independent Consultant

In the software industry since 1983, Mark Richards is an experienced, hands-on software architect involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of microservices architectures, service-oriented architectures, and distributed systems. He has significant experience and expertise in application, integration, and enterprise architecture. Mark is the author of O’Reilly books on microservices;...Read more

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant

For the past ten years Ryan Ripley has worked on agile teams in development, ScrumMaster, and management roles. He’s worked at various Fortune 500 companies in the medical device, wholesale, and financial services industries. Ryan is great at taking tests and holds the PMI-ACP, PSM I, PSM II, PSE, PSPO...Read more

Bill Roberts
Capital One

Bill Roberts had his first experiences in technology as the manager of financial planning and analysis for IT organizations at Bank One, ING DIRECT USA, and Capital One. In 2013 he transitioned to IT as backlog owner for five middleware teams developing APIs. Now ScrumMaster for DevOps team Meteor, Bill...Read more

Larissa Rosochansky
IBM

The head of testing and Oracle services at IBM Brazil, Larissa Rosochansky has worked with project management, quality assurance, and software test for the past fourteen years. She started at IBM almost at the same time testing services began in Brazil and managed projects and teams in both internal or...Read more

Amir_Rozenberg
Director of Product Management
Perfecto Mobile

At Perfecto Mobile Amir Rozenberg is the director of product management, responsible for core product strategy. Amir has pioneered mobile quality practices to extend the service across the application lifecycle. He has extensive experience in the digital industry with expertise in areas of application development, testing, delivery, and monitoring. Previously,...Read more

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.com

Rob Sabourin, P. Eng., has more than thirty-three years of management experience leading teams of software development professionals. A highly-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,...Read more

Priyanka Sharma
Davita

A director of QA at Davita, Priyanka Sharma is helping bring quality engineering to support next generation QA. With more than seventeen years of engineering experience, Priyanka focuses on building frameworks and cultural intelligence strengths. She is passionate about quality upstream and servant leadership. In her career, Priyanka has had...Read more

Jessie Shternshus
The Improv Effect, LLC.

Owner and founder of The Improv Effect, Jessie Shternshus helps individuals and businesses reach their full potential through interpersonal-communication skills improvement, leadership training, and agile/executive coaching. Jessie has been a key player in internal culture transformations for global companies. Her clients include executives from Netflix, Crayola, Groupon, Skype, Adecco, Capital...Read more

Mike_Sowers
TechWell Corp.

TechWell’s CIO and president of SQE Training, Mike Sowers has more than twenty-five years of practical experience as a global leader of internationally distributed test teams across multiple industries. Mike is a senior leader, skilled in working with both large and small organizations to improve their software development, testing, and...Read more

Kevin Stilwell
Dude Solutions

Kevin Stilwell is VP of product management and design at Dude Solutions. Having spent a significant part of his career behind the keyboard building software that directly impacts the day-to-day life of his customers, moving into a product management leadership role was a natural fit. With extensive experience designing and...Read more

Aater Suleman
Flux7

Aater Suleman is co-founder and CEO of Flux7, an Austin TX-based global IT consultancy that helps organizations gain business agility through new technologies using cloud, containers, configuration management, and CI/CD. He uses his extensive background in hardware, performance optimization, and software development to create self-healing cloud infrastructure frameworks that enable...Read more

Damian Synadinos
Ineffable Solutions

Damian Synadinos started testing software—on purpose and for money—in 1993. Since then, he has helped “build better software and build software better” using various methods and tools in numerous roles at many companies in diverse industries. In the past ten years, Damian has focused primarily on teaching and leading testers,...Read more

Faye Thompson
CareWorks Tech

With more than eighteen years of project delivery experience, Faye Thompson is a senior agile consultant with CareWorks Tech. With a focus on agile methodologies and continuous improvement, Faye has had a positive impact in the financial services, healthcare, advertising, and automotive industries. Passionate about using innovative solutions to drive...Read more

Dave Todaro
Ascendle

Concurrent Sessions

For the past thirty years Dave Todaro has been designing and building mission-critical software applications in a variety of leadership roles. He is founder and president of Ascendle, a contract software engineering firm specializing in building custom web and native mobile applications and agile coaching. Ascendle has led agile transformations...Read more

Patrick Turner
Small Footprint

Patrick Turner doesn't just like technology—he loves it. He discovered this passion at the age of ten on a trip to a local Radio Shack with his brother. Since then, Patrick has turned his love of technology into a thriving career, amassing more than twenty years of experience producing software...Read more

Erik van Veenendaal
Improve IT Services BV (Bonaire)

Leading international consultant and trainer Erik van Veenendaal is a recognized expert in the areas of software testing and requirements engineering. He is a core developer of the TMap testing methodology, participant in working parties of the International Requirements Engineering Board, board member of the TMMi Foundation, and prolific author....Read more

Francie Van Wirkus
Francie Van Wirkus

A conqueror of mediocrity, Francie Van Wirkus is a certified professional coach in the insurance and financial services industry, with an agile, lean, and sales focus. Her innovative ways of leading and sustaining change are helping lead a large IT transformation effort in a complex organization, where she is a...Read more

James Waletzky
Crosslake

James Waletzky is a partner at Crosslake Technologies, where he performs technical due diligence on software companies, optimizes software engineering systems, and enables development team improvements in time-to-market, productivity, and overall quality. He has more than twenty years of experience in the software industry, including eleven years working on or...Read more

Matt Wallens
Artifact

For more than twenty years, Matt Wallens has researched and designed products for web, desktop, and mobile, and guided clients through project discovery, strategy, and functional design. He works with small to medium-sized businesses and digital agencies to design usable products by understanding their customer’s needs. He believes that good...Read more

Anders Wallgren
Electric Cloud

Chief technology officer of Electric Cloud Anders Wallgren has more than twenty-five years of in-depth experience designing and building commercial software. Previously, Anders held executive positions at Aceva, Archistra, and Impresse; and management positions at Macromedia, Common Ground Software, and Verity, where he played critical technical leadership roles in delivering...Read more

Dave West
Scrum.org

Dave West is the CEO/product owner at Scrum.org. He is a frequent speaker and widely published author of articles and his acclaimed book, Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. Dave led the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and worked with Ivar Jacobson to run the North American business...Read more

Dave Westerveld
Ansys, Inc.

Dave Westerveld is a senior test analyst at Ansys, Inc., where he has been involved in testing many different projects—from well-established products to the early stages of major new initiatives. His testing roles have included being a bug hunter, helping build out an automation framework, and mentoring other testers. Dave...Read more

Paul Wynia
Strategic Play USA

Paul Wynia is an agile coach and consultant with twenty years of software industry experience including running his own company, Work Agile Consulting. Paul is a licensed trainer of the Lego® Serious Play® methodologies with Strategic Play, USA, and a certified trainer for Training from the Back of the Room....Read more