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Speaker Index

As an agile coach with Blue Agility, and co-founder 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.

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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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Allstate Insurance

A senior manager leading enterprise release management, metrics, and a global QA team, Sandra Alequin has spent her entire twenty-six year career with Allstate Insurance. Sandra began her career as a claim representative and transitioned into the technology area where she has worked her way into upper management.

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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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Scott Aziz has spent twenty-six years in software quality assurance and testing roles as a test architect, manager, and testing division leader for leading companies, including Lotus Development, Sun Microsystems, Intuit, and Fidelity Investments. Scott has developed and executed strategies for advanced testing projects such as cloud, SOA, and application vulnerability testing. Currently, he is the senior director of a global testing services provider for Fortune 500 companies.

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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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Chief performance evangelist for SmartBear, Scott Barber is a respected leader in the advancement of software testing practices, an industry activist, and load testing celebrity of sorts. Scott authored several books―Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications, Beautiful Testing, How to Reduce the Cost of Testing, and Web Load Testing for Dummies―and more than 100 articles and blog posts. Founder/president of PerfTestPlus, Scott co-founded the WOPR, served as director of the AST and CMG, and is a founding member of ISST.

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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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Passionately focused on the facilitation of high-performance software development teams, Tricia Broderick brings seventeen years of experience including the past seven years of focus with an agile mindset. Tricia leverages and openly shares work experience stories and examples to inspire people, especially managers and leaders, to reach new heights through continuous reflection, both as individuals and as members of innovative teams. She is a highly experienced leader, coach, mentor, presenter, trainer, and speaker, speaker.

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Unfortunately this presentation has been cancelled.

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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.

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Katy Douglass looks at business holistically as an integrated system of people, business processes, and information technology. She is passionate about bridging the gap between leadership and technical teams. An information technology consultant at Nationwide Financial, Katy has extensive quality assurance and testing experience in roles of test analyst, agile team test lead, project test lead, testing consultant, and program test lead. Today she is the quality assurance and testing lead for one of Nationwide’s largest IT project portfolios.

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Chief consultant at Mondo Strategies since 2005, Ernani Ferrari has managed R&D, customer support, services, customer relationship, sales, channels, international operations, alliances, corporate universities, and marketing for companies including Infor, Totvs, and QAD. Ermani has restructured development organizations in the United States, Europe, South America, and Asia.

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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 RGCG; and frequent speaker on software development, project management, software testing, and team leadership at conferences and professional groups. He is a Certified Scrum Coach, Certified Scrum Product Owner, and an active member of the Agile and Scrum Alliances.

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Go Pro Management, Inc.

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.

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InterContinental Hotels Group

Andrew Graves is a strategically-oriented agile coach, specializing in transitioning organizations to agile. This includes preparing senior management and business partners for changes resulting from agile’s introduction, and working with development teams to help them understand and adopt the principles of the agile framework. Andrew’s focus in the past few years has been on the successful implementation of agile principles and practices for various customers in the insurance, financial services, manufacturing, and hospitality industries.

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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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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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 A senior product manager at Seilevel, Candase Hokanson helps her clients clearly understand the desired business value of the projects she works on so the project team can focus on only the features/requirements that bring the most value. With this technique, Candase has cut up to 80 percent of project scope in unrelated or low priority requirements for multiple projects.

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With over twenty years’ experience delivering technology solutions; Anne Hungate’s passion is engineering systems with the user experience in mind.  Anne is a Senior Director of Software Quality at DIRECTV where she drives capability improvement so that customers get better products and features faster.  Helping her teams embrace the new methods is the challenge and the fun.   Anne earned her MBA at Case Western Reserve University and holds CSQA and PMP designations.

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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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Ken Johnston is the principal engineering manager for the Microsoft Operating Systems Data Integration and Insights team. Since joining Microsoft in 1998, Ken has filled many other roles, including test lead, test manager, and group program manager. Recently he has worked on Bing Data Quality and Measurements, Cosmos (the Microsoft big data platform), and the Windows Apps Store. For two and a half years, Ken served as the Microsoft director of test excellence. He is a frequent speaker, blogger, and author on big data, software testing, and online services development.

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Robb Kelman is a Senior Manager of Tools & Architecture for DIRECTV’s Software Quality Team, where he has developed the Integrated QA Labs and implemented many tools and processes to support them.  With over fifteen years’ experience delivering Enterprise Software he has developed a passion for continuous improvement and innovation to eliminate waste and drive quality.   Robb has an MBA in IT Management from UC Irvine and has a Lean-Six Sigma Green Belt designation. 

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Ryan Kleps has been involved in various aspects of Information Technology for more than thirty years. During his career, Ryan has looked for opportunities to make his and others’ work more enjoyable. In 2008, he developed a unique gamified approach to training which he and his colleagues have used to train more than 2,000 people in agile software development practices within Boeing. Ryan has presented at the GSummit 2014 San Francisco, several Boeing conferences, and at Rally’s AgilePalooza.

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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.

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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. Recent 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.

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A software consultant at the Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc. in New York City, Tim Lister divides his time consulting, teaching, and writing. Tim is a coauthor with his Guild partners of Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior; coauthor with Tom DeMarco of Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects—both Jolt Award winners as General Computing Book of the Year. Tim and Tom coauthored the classic Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 3rd Edition.

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Monika Mehrotra is an accomplished IT leader with more than fifteen years of strategic leadership and management experience providing technology-enabled business solutions. Monika’s professional experience includes strategic planning, IT portfolio management, business development, client relationship management, business process consultancy, and leading complex software development programs in a global delivery model. She possesses a deep expertise in financial services, insurance, and healthcare.

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Tatiana Melnik is an attorney who helps her clients protect their information as well as the information entrusted to them by others. Tatiana practices in the areas of IT, healthcare, data privacy and security, regulatory compliance, and intellectual property. She is a managing editor of the Nanotechnology Law and Business Journal, a standing contributor to the Journal of Health Care Compliance, and a former council member of the Michigan Bar Information Technology Law Council.

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Chief technology officer and a cofounder of LeanDog, Jeff “Cheezy” Morgan has been teaching classes and coaching teams on agile and lean techniques since early 2004. Most of his work has focused on the engineering practices used by developers and testers. For the past few years Cheezy has experienced great success and recognition for his work focused on helping teams adopt Acceptance Test Driven Development using Cucumber. He has authored several popular Ruby gems used by software testers and the book Cucumber & Cheese—A Testers Workshop.

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Rob Myers is the founder of Agile Institute. He has twenty-eight years of professional experience on software development teams, and has been training and coaching organizations in Agile, Scrum, and Extreme Programming topics since 1998. He has recently worked with numerous organizations, from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies, helping them with cultural change and essential practices during their Agile transformations.

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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 like The Kanban Racing Challenge, which provide a safe learning environment for new ideas. He promotes testing as a serious technical discipline.

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LitheSpeed

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 was 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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Paul Reed, senior associate with EBG Consulting, has led agile teams working on complex products in companies of all sizes. Paul excels at helping companies transition to agile by leveraging an adaptive rollout strategy. He is a frequent conference speaker and author of Developing Applications with Java and UML and Developing Applications with Visual Basic and UML. A practicing Certified ScrumMaster, Paul offers hands-on experience in bringing real-world, sound architecture into the product lifecycle.

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Principal consultant and a member of the core team at Agile Artisans, Jared Richardson works with other software craftsmen to build excellent custom software. He sold his first software program in 1991 and has been immersed in software ever since. Jared has authored and coauthored 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 agile.

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AmiBug.com

Rob Sabourin, P. Eng., has more than thirty-three 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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With more than forty years of experience, the founder and CEO of Net Objectives Al Shalloway is an industry thought leader in lean, SAFe, kanban, product portfolio management, Scrum, and agile design. Al helps companies transition enterprise-wide to lean and agile methods, and teaches courses in these areas—one of a handful of SAFe SPC trainers.

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In 2007  Roy Solomon cofounded Applause (as uTest), based on his extensive experience managing quality assurance and testing for global companies. Roy recognized that, no matter how much testing was done, bugs were still being found and saw the need for an on-demand, real-world testing solution. Soon, in-the-wild testing and the roots of the Applause vision of 360 degree app quality were born. Today, Roy leads the company’s product strategy efforts.

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Daniel Steinberg has spent the last three decades working as a professional Swift developer. OK, he hasn't. But he's really enjoying the Swift Programming Language. Daniel has been writing apps for the iPhone and the iPad since the SDKs first appeared in beta and for OS X for many years before. Daniel is the author of the best selling books A Swift Kickstart and Developing iOS 7 Apps for iPad and iPhone, the official companion book to the popular iTunes U series from Stanford University.

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Progressive Insurance

Raj Subramanian, a former developer for a payroll processing company, moved to testing to focus on his passion. Raj currently works as a test engineer for Progressive Insurance with a specific focus on mobile testing. He actively contributes to the testing community by speaking at conferences, writing articles, blogging, and being directly involved in various testing-related activities. In Cleveland, Ohio, Raj serves on the board of a local conference group and is the co-organizer of a  testers’ meet-up group.

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John Terzakis has more than twenty-five years of experience developing, writing, and testing software. With Intel for fourteen years, John is currently a staff engineer working with teams on enhancing product requirements to reduce planning and development times, reduce defects, and improve overall product quality. He is a certified Intel instructor for Requirements Engineering courses. John’s prior experience includes director and manager roles with Shiva, Racal InterLan, and Dataproducts. He was also a member of the technical staff at Bell Labs.

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Al Wagner is a testing evangelist with IBM Rational, driving thought leadership, strategic initiatives, and tangible solutions to help test professionals cope with their testing challenges. Focusing for the past three years on continuous test automation, service virtualization, and quality management, combined with his fifteen years of practical field experience, Al has assisted, mentored, and enabled both internal and external teams with their IT application infrastructure, development, implementation, and operations challenges.

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Ken Whitaker of Leading Software Maniacs® has more than twenty-five years of software development executive leadership and training experience in a various roles and industries. He has led commercial software teams at Software Publishing (remember Harvard Graphics?), Data General, embedded systems software companies, and enterprise software suppliers. Ken is an active PMI® registered education provider, Project Management Professional (PMP)® certified, and a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM).

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James Whittaker is a technology executive with a career that spans academia, start-ups, and top tech companies. With a PhD in computer science, James worked for IBM, Ericsson, SAP, Cisco, and Microsoft. In 1996, he joined the faculty at Florida Institute of Technology where his work in Y2K testing and software security earned many awards. James’ first stint at Microsoft was in Trustworthy Computing and then Visual Studio. In 2009, he joined Google as an engineering director and led teams working on Chrome, Chrome OS, Maps, and Google+.

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A technical evangelist for Red Gate Software, Mike Wood is a problem solving, outdoorsy, user group founding, dog-loving, solution creating, event planning, married, technology speaking, father of one—kind of guy. When he's not living up to all that, Mike is an avid reader, (horrible) violinist, and gamer. He is one of the founding directors of the Cincinnati .NET User Group and the editor for the JustAzure.com educational website. Microsoft has presented Mike the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in Microsoft Azure for the past four years.

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A principal engineer at Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, in Munich, Germany, Peter Zimmerer has been working in the field of software testing and quality engineering for more than twenty years. Peter performs consulting, coaching, and training on test management and test engineering practices in real-world projects, driving research and innovation in this area. An ISTQB® Certified Tester Full Advanced Level, Peter is a member of the German Testing Board, has authored several journal and conference contributions, and is a frequent speaker at international conferences.

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