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Speaker Index

An agile coach with WSA Consulting, Inc., Steve Adolph partners with Scaled Agile and Rally Software where he pursues his passion for helping organizations get the job done. He has been creating and managing software development projects long enough to remember Fortran and OS/MVT JCL. Steve’s 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.

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Editor-in-chief 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.

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Scott Allen is the founder of OdeToCode and the CTO of Maryland-based Medisolv, Inc. Scott has more than twenty years of commercial software development experience across a wide range of technologies. He has delivered software products for embedded devices, Windows desktop, websites, and mobile platforms. A popular trainer and speaker, Scott is known for delivering quality content on Pluralsight.com and using his unique teaching abilities in classrooms worldwide. Scott is the coauthor of Professional ASP.NET MVC 4 and a co-host of the popular Herding Code podcast.

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Scott Ambler works with organizations worldwide to help them improve their software processes. Scott is the founder of the Agile Modeling, Agile Data, Disciplined Agile Delivery, and Enterprise Unified Process methodologies, and creator of the Agile Scaling Model. A senior contributing editor with Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Scott is the coauthor of twenty-one books, including Refactoring Databases, Agile Modeling, Agile Database Techniques, The Object Primer 3rd Edition, The Enterprise Unified Process, and Disciplined Agile Delivery.

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LitheSpeed

Sanjiv Augustine is an industry-leading agile and lean expert, author, speaker, management consultant, and trainer. He is the president of LitheSpeed, an agile consulting, training, and product development company. For more than twelve years, 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.

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LitheSpeed

Arlen Bankston is an established leader in the application and evolution of process management methodologies such as Lean, Six Sigma and BPM, as well as Agile software development processes such as Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum. He is a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and Certified ScrumMaster Trainer. He also has twelve years of experience in product design, leveraging principles of information architecture, interaction design and usability to develop innovative products that meet customers' expressed and unspoken needs.

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Matt Barcomb (@mattbarcomb) is passionate about building collaborative, cross-functional teams; enjoys being out-of-doors; loves punning; and thrives on guiding organizations toward sustainable, adaptive, and holistic improvement. Matt started programming as a wee lad and eventually wound up getting paid for it. It took him nearly ten years to realize that “people problems” were the biggest issue facing most software development businesses.

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Jennifer Bonine is a VP of global delivery and solutions for tap|QA Inc., a global company that specializes in strategic solutions for businesses. Jennifer began her career in consulting, implementing large ERP solutions. She 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 a recent engagement for one of the world’s largest technology companies, Jennifer served as a strategy executive and in corporate marketing for the C-Suite.

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Brian Button is VP of engineering and director of agile methods at Asynchrony, a St. Louis-based industry-leading agile transformation and development organization. Brian has twenty-seven years of experience, the past thirteen spent in most every role possible on an agile team. He leads the agile practice at Asynchrony, providing training, coaching, and development services using the agile methods to companies worldwide.

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Lean TECHniques, Inc.

A self-proclaimed nerd, Brandon Carlson works for Lean TECHniques, Inc., an IT consultancy that helps teams deliver high-value, high-quality products to market. Since starting his career in 1995, Brandon has held positions from development and architecture to management—and he’s still learning. Passionate about elevating the performance of IT as a whole, he has helped numerous organizations from startups to Fortune 100 companies improve their product development and delivery systems.

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With her tremendous passion for programming, Iris Classon has had a remarkable career that proves that anything is possible. A registered and licensed clinical dietitian, Iris decided in 2011 to learn programming and rapidly accelerated from 0 to 100. Within her first year, she earned several certifications, landed a developer job, and after just six months, was a technical evangelist for the renowned international company Telerik. In less than two years, Iris was awarded a Microsoft MVP for her contributions in the C# community.

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Software Quality Engineering

A consultant, lecturer, author, and test manager, Rick Craig has led numerous teams of testers on both large and small projects. In his twenty-five years of consulting worldwide, Rick has advised and supported a diverse group of organizations on many testing and test management issues. From large insurance providers and telecommunications companies to smaller software services companies, he has mentored senior software managers and helped test teams improve their effectiveness.

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Levi Deal Consulting

Michael Dedolph is self-employed as a consultant and innkeeper. For the past seven years, Michael led quality process improvement efforts at CSC and Lucent. Previously, he was a systems architecture review leader at Bell Labs (Lucent) and facilitated numerous risk identification and project retrospective sessions. Prior to 1997 Michael worked in the Risk and Process programs at the SEI where he was the technical lead for teams that developed the SCE and CBA-IPI appraisal methods.

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Esther Derby Associates, Inc.

Esther Derby started her career as a programmer and over the years has worn many hats, including business owner, internal consultant, and manager. From all these perspectives, one thing became clear—our level of individual, team, and company success is deeply impacted by our work environment and organizational dynamics. As a result, Esther has spent the last twenty-five years helping companies design their environment, culture, and human dynamics for optimum success. She has served three terms on the board of directors of the Agile Alliance.

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George Dinwiddie is an independent software development consultant who helps organizations, large and small, increase the effectiveness of their software development efforts. As a coach, George he provides guidance over a broad range, at the organizational, process, team, interpersonal, and technical levels. As a trainer, he offers experiential education in technical practices and agile methods. George is currently crusading to break down the barriers that hinder effective collaboration between the business, the programmers, and the testers.

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Since 1980, Dale Emery has worked in both IT organizations and software product development companies as a developer, manager, process steward, trainer, and consultant. He helps people apply the agile values of communication, feedback, simplicity, courage, and respect to software development. Dale's combination of deep technical expertise and extensive organizational development experience makes him particularly effective in working with software teams.

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Cory Foy, LLC

A passionate technical executive, developer, blogger, and speaker, Cory Foy has more than sixteen years of software and technology experience, and ten years of agile and lean methods experience. His background includes work in the health care, financial, and technology sectors, serving as a Premier Field Engineer and Team System Ranger for Microsoft; consulting with DirecTV, Stratos Global, and Invensys as a senior consultant for Net Objectives; and architecting solutions for organizations such as MIT's College of Engineering while at 8th Light.

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Paul Fratellone’s career in quality assurance and testing began in the mid-1980s and has spanned multiple industries and domains. Through the years, Paul has recognized certain patterns and pain points which all organizations need to deal with. Building a business case for justifying investments in quality and testing has enabled organizations to not only measure success but continually improve. Paul’s perspective and passion are clearly rooted in ensuring teams provide value to the business and ultimately to end users.

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An agile methodologist, practitioner, and coach based in Cary, NC, Bob Galen helps guide companies in their adoption of Scrum and other agile methodologies and practices. Bob is a principal agile evangelist at Velocity Partners, a leading agile nearshore development partner; president of RGalen Consulting Group; and frequent speaker on software development, project management, software testing, and team leadership at conferences and professional groups.

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In the IT industry for more than twenty years, Julie Gardiner has held positions as an analyst programmer, Oracle DBA, and project manager. She has first-hand experience as a test analyst, test team leader, test consultant, and test manager. Previously with UK-based Grove Consultants for seven years, Julie now is head of agile, talent and transition management with The Test People. A certified ScrumMaster and agile coach, Julie also specializes in risk-based testing, agile testing, test management, and people issues.

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Agile testing coach and practitioner Janet Gregory (@janetgregoryca) is the coauthor of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams and a contributor to 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know. Janet specializes in showing agile teams how testers can add value in areas beyond critiquing the product. For the past ten years, she has been working with teams to transition to agile development.

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A systems engineer and project management consultant, Payson Hall is a founding member of Catalysis Group, Inc. Formally trained as a software engineer and computer scientist, Payson has performed and consulted on a variety of hardware and software systems integration projects in both the public and private sectors throughout North America and Europe during his thirty-year professional career. He has been a writer and featured speaker on topics of systems integration, project management, and risk management.

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Bob Hartman’s logic-based approach to development and quality was honed early in his now more than thirty-year software development career. Bob has acquired wide-ranging industry knowledge by working as a software developer, tester, product manager, project manager, development manager, and executive. During the past ten years, he has grown from being an early adopter of agile to his current status as a Certified Scrum Trainer and Coach.

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Jeff Hassemer is a global product marketing executive known for his thought leadership and notable product achievements in the areas of database-marketing, CRM, and marketing-automation technology solutions. Jeff serves as senior vice president of Global Product Strategy for Experian Marketing Services. Experian’s clients gain competitive advantages and optimized marketing spends as a direct result of the profitable, state-of-the-art strategies, programs and processes that Jeff oversees and directs in his diverse product portfolio.

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PerfTestPlus, Inc.

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.

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Kevlin Henney is an independent consultant, speaker, writer, and trainer helping individuals, teams, and companies improve the state of their development practice. Kevlin’s development interests are in patterns, programming, and process, with a long track record in programming practices, agile skills, and software architecture. He has contributed to open source projects and been a columnist for various magazines and websites, including Better Software, The Register, Java Report, and CUJ.

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One of the original founders of the David Consulting Group, David Herron is now a business development manager and VP of knowledge solution services with DCG. With more than thirty-five years of experience in functional measurement and software process improvement, David has provided consulting and coaching services to a variety of IT organizations throughout the US and Canada.

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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.

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Brenda Kise has fifteen years of experience in software, including development, test, test automation, management, and operations. Brenda has led teams that have automated testing from the ground up with a new code base and for Symantec’s NetBackup division, leading a team automating a legacy code base.

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Kohl Concepts, Inc.

Jonathan Kohl is an internationally recognized consultant, technical leader, and popular author and speaker based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The founder and principal consultant of Kohl Concepts, Inc., Jonathan helps companies define and implement their ideas into products, trains practitioners as they develop software on teams, and works with leaders to help them define and implement their strategic visions.

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Todd Little is a senior development manager for Landmark Graphics. Todd has been involved in most aspects of software development with a focus on commercial software applications for oil and gas exploration and production. He is a coauthor of the Declaration of Interdependence and a founding member and past president of the Agile Leadership Network.

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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, Roche, and other Fortune 100 companies.

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Iain McCowatt is a software testing expert whose experience and passion for testing spans multiple industries and more than a decade. Iain specializes in helping client organizations solve difficult testing problems on large and complex enterprise IT projects. In this role, his greatest revelation in recent years is that the single most important contributor to success or failure is people—in particular how they think and react to problems. Therefore, Iain is dedicated to better understanding how we make decisions—and what can get in the way.

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Agile Institute

Rob Myers is founder of the Agile Institute and a founding member of the Agile Cooperative. With twenty-seven years of professional experience on software development teams, Rob has consulted for leading companies in aerospace, government, medical, software, and financial sectors. He has been training and coaching organizations in Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) management and development practices since 1999.

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Dan North & Associates, Ltd.

Programmer and organizational change specialist Dan North applies principles from lean operations and agile software development to help organizations align their technology capabilities with their business objectives.

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An agile player-coach and founder of CodeSquads, Nate Oster helps clients adopt lean and agile methods. Nate builds high-performance teams that adapt to change, embrace a pragmatic philosophy of continuous improvement, measure progress with new features, and deliver high-quality software that delights customers. As a coach, he inspires adopters with hands-on mentoring and simulations that provide a safe learning environment for new ideas. Nate promotes testing as a serious technical discipline.

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Cognizant Technology Solutions

Benny Paul brings more than fifteen years of IT experience to Cognizant Testing Services where he is responsible for program management, strategic planning, and delivery of QA Services. Benny is experienced in building and managing large scale QA programs in multiple domains, with resolute focus on improving QA maturity practices, enhancing quality engineering and delivery, incorporating optimization techniques, and implementing practical and effective process improvement methods.

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Bob Payne is the VP of enterprise consulting services and a leading proponent of lean/agile methodologies and agile engineering practices. Bob has more than twenty-five years of organizational transformation, project management, software development, engineering, and business experience. A principal coach and consultant at Fortune 100 organizations, he has mentored teams from 5–200+. Bob leads by example, mentoring and training teams to create change agents within organizations.

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

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International leadership expert, Pollyanna Pixton developed the models for collaboration and collaborative leadership through her thirty-eight years of working inside and consulting with many organizations. She helps companies create workplaces where talent and innovation are unleashed—making them more productive, efficient, and profitable. Pollyanna is a founding partner of Accelinnova, president of Evolutionary Systems, and director of the Institute for Collaborative Leadership.

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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.

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Linda Rising’s background includes university teaching and industry work in telecommunications, avionics, and strategic weapons systems. An internationally-known presenter on topics related to patterns, retrospectives, and the change process, Linda is the author of Design Patterns in Communications Software, The Pattern Almanac 2000, The Patterns Handbook, and coauthor (with Mary Lynn Manns) of Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas.

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Polarion Software

In a career spanning some twenty years, Stefano Rizzo has been a methodology consultant, a pre-sales engineer, an IT researcher, a university professor, VP of R&D for a large consortium, Regional Sales Director for a software company, and CEO of two software development organizations. With his broad experience in the Application Lifecycle Management arena, he has been leading Product Management for Polarion Software’s product lines from its first release in 2005 until 2010.

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Known as the “Pragmatic Manager,”Johanna Rothman helps organizational leaders identify problems and risks in their product development and recognize potential “gotchas,” seize opportunities, and remove impediments. Johanna is the technical editor for agileconnection.com and is author of Manage Your Job Search, Hiring Geeks That Fit, Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, the 2008 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It!

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AmiBug.com

Rob Sabourin, P. Eng., has more than thirty 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.

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Ade Shokoya is a Certified ScrumMaster and Scrum Professional, business analyst, and agile consultant who specializes in multi-million dollar agile transition projects. With more than eleven years of experience and a client list that includes internationally recognized companies including News Corps, Tesco, Metro, LexisNexis, and Capita, Ade Shokoya adopts a K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple & Straightforward) approach to agile transition.

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Ahmed Sidky, aka Dr. Agile, combines more than fifteen years of software development experience with research from his Ph.D. in agile transformation and agility assessment to guide enterprise agile transformations in Fortune 100 companies. Ahmed helps small to medium companies worldwide realize sustainable organizational agility and educates people—CEOs to developers—on the agile mindset and creating lean high-performing teams. The principal consultant at SCG Inc. and co-author of Becoming Agile in an Imperfect World, Ahmed consults, teaches, and writes.

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Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Kyle Thomson, a vice president at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, is an experienced agile software developer. Kyle has worked in Australia, Canada, England, and most recently in the United States, helping to transform a 300-member technology department into a lean software development shop. Having learned, practiced, and taught agile development techniques such as test-driven development, continuous integration, and specification by example, Kyle can’t imagine going back to the “old ways” and is passionate about making sure his organization doesn’t go back either.

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Jim Trentadue has more than fourteen years of experience as a coordinator/manager in the software testing field. Jim’s various roles in testing have focused on test execution, automation, management, environment management, standards deployment, and test tool implementation. In the area of offshore testing, he has worked with multiple large firms on developing and coordinating cohesive relationships.

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A leading international consultant, trainer, and recognized expert in software testing, Erik van Veenendaal (erikvanveenendaal.nl) is the founder of Improve IT Services BV, a company that specializes in testing, requirements engineering, and quality management.

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The author of implementingscrum.com, Michael Vizdos travels internationally working with clients to improve delivery of products to their customers using Scrum and other agile techniques. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer with more than twenty years of experience in all facets of software development and product delivery.

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Leading Software Maniacs

Ken Whitaker of Leading Software Maniacs™ (LSM) has more than twenty-five years of software development executive leadership and training experience in a variety of technology roles and industries, leading many commercial software development teams. He is an active PMI® member, Project Management Professional certified, and a Certified ScrumMaster.

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Development Partners Software Corporation

Bill Wilder is a hands-on architect, trainer, writer, and community leader focused on helping companies and individuals succeed with the cloud using the Windows Azure Platform. Bill began working with Windows Azure when it was unveiled at the Microsoft PDC in 2008 and in 2009 founded Boston Azure (bostonazure.org), the first Windows Azure user group in the world. He is recognized by Microsoft as a Windows Azure MVP and an Azure Insider.

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Peter Zimmerer is a principal engineer at Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, in Munich, Germany. For more than twenty years Peter has been working in the field of software testing and quality engineering. He performs consulting, coaching, and training on test management and test engineering practices in real-world projects, driving research and innovation in this area.

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