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Speaker Index

Bob Aiello

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. Bob served as vice chair of the IEEE 828 Standards Working Group on CM Planning and a member of the IEEE Software and Systems Engineering Standards Committee Management Board. Contact Bob at [email protected], via LinkedIn, or visit cmbestpractices.com.

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Alan Ark

A senior SDET with Eid Passport, Alan Ark helps the test organization cultivate and develop its automation solutions. Alan draws on more than twenty years of experience in various software quality roles when creating automated solutions to testing problems. Several of his projects have been presented at Quality Week and Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference. These projects include validating a buggy data conversion of historical stock trading data into the Euro, championing the use of automated testing in new organizations, and creating testing frameworks from scratch. See Alan’s profile on LinkedIn.

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Sanjiv Augustine

Sanjiv Augustine is an industry-leading agile and lean expert, author, speaker, management consultant, trainer, and founder of the Agile Leadership Network. He is the president of LitheSpeed, an agile consulting, training, and product development company. For more than fifteen 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. He is the author of Managing Agile Projects, Transitioning to Agile Project Management: A Roadmap for the Perplexed, and The Lean-Agile PMO: Using Lean Thinking to Accelerate Agile Project Delivery.

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James Bach

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. James is the author of Lessons Learned in Software Testing and Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar: How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion Can Lead to a Lifetime of Success.

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Arlen Bankston

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. Arlen has led agile and lean deployment, and managed process improvement projects at clients such as Capital One, T. Rowe Price, Freddie Mac, and the Armed Forces Benefits Association. Arlen's recent work has centered on combining Lean Six Sigma process improvement methods with agile execution to dramatically improve both the speed and quality of business results. He has also led the integration of interaction design and usability practices into agile methodologies, presenting and training frequently at both industry conferences and to Fortune 100 clients.

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Aaron Barrett

Nineteen years ago Aaron Barrett was in his first job—software tester at a small educational software company. Since that time, Aaron has held testing, development, and management roles in a variety of organizations in the government, education, and business software verticals. Vice president of software engineering at Infusionsoft in Chandler, AZ, and a certified ScrumMaster, Aaron currently oversees a development group that operates in an agile Scrum software development environment. Aaron has driven hard to produce high-quality, valuable software by marrying his technology know-how with business acumen.

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Michael Bolton

Tester, consultant, and trainer Michael Bolton is the coauthor (with James Bach) of Rapid Software Testing, a course that presents a methodology and mindset for testing software expertly in uncertain conditions and under extreme time pressure. A leader in the context-driven software testing movement, Michael has twenty years of experience testing, developing, managing, and writing about software. Currently, he leads DevelopSense, a Toronto-based consultancy. Prior to DevelopSense, he was with Quarterdeck Corporation, where he managed the company’s flagship products and directed project and testing teams—both in-house and worldwide. Contact Michael at [email protected].

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Jennifer Bonine

A VP of global delivery and solutions for tap|QA, Inc., Jennifer Bonine began her career in consulting, implementing large ERP solutions. Jennifer has held executive level positions leading development, quality assurance and testing, organizational development, and process improvement teams for Fortune 500 companies in several domains. In an engagement for one of the world’s largest technology companies, Jennifer served as a strategy executive and in corporate marketing for the C-Suite. In her career, she has had several opportunities to build global teams from the ground up and has been fortunate to see how many of the world’s top companies operate from the C-Suite viewpoint.

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Laurent Bossavit

A software developer with more than twenty years of development experience and a few years as an independent consultant, Laurent Bossavit heads Institut Agile which aims to help agile software development become better established as a disciplined development process. Passionate about helping people in agile communities network and support one another, Laurent is a former member of the Agile Alliance board, recipient of the 2006 Gordon Pask award for contributions to agile practice, and co-founder of the Coding Dojos. He is the author of The Leprechauns of Software Engineering: How Folklore Turns into Fact and What To Do about It.

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Farm Credit Services of America
Anthony Carlson

A lead application developer with Farm Credit Services of America, Anthony Carlson has been using Microsoft technology since 1999. His software journey has been through various forms of service-oriented architecture for client and web applications. On the first team at Farm Credit Services to use an agile methodology for software development, Anthony helped champion practices such as test-driven development and service-level testing using NUnit and Fitnesse. Currently, he is part of the mobile development team where his focus is on the iOS, Android, and responsive platforms. Follow Anthony on Twitter @anthonyacarlson.

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Lean TECHniques, Inc.
Brandon Carlson

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. Brandon can be reached on Twitter @bcarlso and pretty much everywhere else on the web as “bcarlso.” Read his blog at bcarlso.net/.

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Steve Caseley

In IT consulting and project management for more than thirty-five years, Steve Caseley has a wealth of hands-on PM experience in a wide range of industries, project types, and sizes, using both agile and traditional project delivery. With a recent focus on combining the best of both delivery approaches, Steve has experienced success delivering large agile projects within a traditional delivery environment. Through this work, oriented toward improving the efficiency of the IT delivery organization, Steve has developed a solid understanding of the issues and principles required to successfully implement solutions using a combination of rapid development techniques and traditional project management.

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Lee Copeland

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. He is the author of the popular reference book, A Practitioner’s Guide to Software Test Design.

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Software Quality Engineering
Rick Craig

A consultant, lecturer, author, and test manager, Rick Craig has led numerous teams of testers on both large and small projects. In his thirty 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. Rick is coauthor of Systematic Software Testing and is a frequent speaker at testing conferences, including every STAR conference since its inception in 1992.

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tap | QA
Industry Technical Presentations Continuous Integration & The Evolution of Automation
Michael Faulise

Michael Faulise is the founder and managing partner at tap|QA, LLC, a global company that specializes in quality solutions for businesses. Mike focuses on sales and delivery where he consults with clients in the areas of leading development, quality assurance and testing, technology and process training, and process improvement. He has seen software development evolve along the multiple paths of various methodologies but has found quality has remained essentially constant.

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Cory Foy

Cory Foy is a passionate technical leader and coach with more than fifteen years of experience managing and leading teams worldwide. Cory has been most active as a member of the agile software community, consulting and speaking on topics such as Innovation Games, Extreme Programming, Scrum, Kanban, and software craftsmanship. He has spent the past several years helping clients increase organizational agility and think differently about their work through a combination of lean and agile principles coupled with Serious Play. The CTO of Pretty Kool Apps, an education startup, Cory currently coaches, consults, and trains for a variety of clients.

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Bob Galen

An agile methodologist, practitioner, and coach, Bob Galen ([email protected])helps guide companies in their adoption of Scrum and other agile methodologies and practices. Bob is a principal agile evangelist at Velocity Partners; president of RGCG; and frequent speaker on software development, project management, software testing, and team leadership. He is a Certified Scrum Coach, Certified Scrum Product Owner, and an active member of the Agile and Scrum Alliances. Bob published Scrum Product Ownership–Balancing Value from the Inside Out.

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Julie Gardiner

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. She has held positions of test analyst, test team leader, test consultant, and test manager in the public sector and in the financial, broadcasting, insurance, utilities, retail, web, and telecom industries using both traditional and agile methodologies. Julie is a certified ScrumMaster and agile coach.

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Go Pro Management, Inc.
Robin Goldsmith

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

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Gene Gotimer

Gene Gotimer is a senior architect at Coveros, Inc., a software company that uses agile methods to accelerate the delivery of secure, reliable software. As a consultant, Gene works with his customers build software better, faster, and more securely by introducing agile development and DevOps practices such as continuous integration, repeatable builds, unit testing, automated functional testing, analysis tools, security scanning, and automated deploys. He has successfully brought these techniques into commercial and government clients, including the US Department of Defense. Gene feels strongly the repeatability, quality, and security are all strongly intertwined; each of them is dependent on the other two, which just makes DevOps that much more crucial to software development.

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Jon Hagar

Jon Hagar is a systems-software engineer and tester consultant supporting software product integrity and verification and validation, with a specialization in embedded and mobile software systems. For more than thirty years Jon has worked in software engineering, particularly testing, supporting projects including control systems (avionics and auto), spacecraft, mobile-smart devices, IT, and attack testing of smart phones. Jon has built and managed embedded test labs with test automation, publishes and speaks regularly with more than fifty presentations and papers, and authored Software Test Attacks to Break Mobile and Embedded Devices, a new book on mobile/embedded software.

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Florida Virtual Campus
Barry Harvey

With more than twenty years of quality and project management experience, Barry Harvey currently leads the quality assurance team at the Florida Virtual Campus (Complete Florida Plus). His team focuses on ensuring that the academic support products and services supplied to Florida’s public higher education institutions are both useful and usable. Barry’s professional experience—and certifications in quality and project management—position him to provide service to organizations seeking to implement mission critical systems, mitigate risk associated with organizational change, and guide the improvement of core business processes. Reach Barry at [email protected] to explore any issues in these areas.

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Dawn Haynes

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. Dawn has more than twenty-eight years of experience supporting, administering, developing, and testing software and hardware systems—from small business operations to large corporate enterprises.

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Parasoft
Industry Technical Presentations Busting Software Bugs to Boost Application Security
Arthur Hicken

Arthur Hicken has been involved in automating various practices at Parasoft for more than twenty years. He has worked on projects including database development, the software development lifecycle, web publishing and monitoring, and integration with legacy systems. Arthur has worked with IT departments in companies including Cisco, Vanguard, and Motorola to help improve their software development practices. He has developed and conducted numerous technical training courses at Parasoft. An expert in his field, Arthur has been quoted in Business 2.0, Internet Week, and CNET news.com regarding website quality issues.

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Geoff Horne

Geoff Horne has an extensive background in test program/project directorship and management, architecture, and general consulting. In New Zealand Geoff established and ran ISQA as a testing consultancy which enjoys a local and international clientele in Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. He has held senior test management roles across a number of diverse industry sectors, and is editor and publisher of the recently launched NZTester magazine. Geoff has authored a variety of white papers on software testing and is a regular speaker at the STAR conferences. Married with four children, he enjoys writing and recording contemporary Christian music.

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David Hussman

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. David now leads DevJam, a company composed of agile collaborators. As mentors and practitioners, DevJam (devjam.com) focuses on agility as a tool to help people and companies improve their software production skills.

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Philip Lew

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. Find out more about Philip at xbosoft.com.

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Doc List

Doc List has spent much of his thirty-five years in the software development community in leadership and coaching roles. Doc’s education in clinical and industrial/organizational psychology has contributed to his understanding of language and interaction between people. Roles as agile coach, facilitator, and trainer have brought the importance of language and interaction into finer focus, as has his blog at doclist.me. Doc's experience as a leader, trainer, coach, presenter, facilitator, and professional speaker blends into an unusual appreciation for and mastery of the subtlety of spoken and written language, as well as the power of human interaction in various forms.

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Tim Lister

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. Tim is in his thirtieth year as a panelist for the American Arbitration Association, arbitrating disputes involving software and software services.

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Paul E. McMahon

Principal of PEM Systems, Paul E. McMahon has been an independent consultant/coach since 1997 helping organizations increase agility and process maturity. Paul has taught software engineering, conducted workshops on engineering processes and management, and published numerous articles and books including 15 Fundamentals for Higher Performance in Software Development and Integrating CMMI and Agile Development: Case Studies and Proven Techniques for Faster Performance Improvement. A Certified Scrum Master and Certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, Paul’s insights reflect twenty-four years of experience working for companies such as Link Simulation and Lockheed Martin. Reach Paul at [email protected].

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Tatiana Melnik

Attorney Tatiana Melnik 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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Rob Myers

The founder of Agile Institute, Rob Myers has twenty-nine years of professional experience on software development teams, and has been training and coaching organizations in Agile, Scrum, and Extreme Programming topics since 1998. Rob has worked with numerous organizations, from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies, helping them with cultural change and essential practices during their agile transformations. His courses are always a blend of fun and practical hands-on labs, "Training from the Back of the Room” learning techniques, and first-person stories from both successful and not-so-successful agile implementations.

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Nate Oster

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 also promotes testing as a serious technical discipline. Though he’s a frequent speaker at conferences, Nate spends most of his time as a hands-on advisor to software product teams from startups to multinationals. He is easily defeated at all card games. Contact him at [email protected].

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Eversource Energy
Gerie Owen

Gerie Owen is a testing and quality assurance consultant, Certified ScrumMaster, conference presenter, and author on testing and test management topics. Gerie manages large, complex projects involving multiple applications; coordinates test teams across multiple time zones; and delivers high quality projects. She enjoys mentoring new test leads and brings a cohesive team approach to testing. Visit Gerie on her website gerieowen.com, her Software Testing in the Trenches blog, and on Twitter @GerieOwen.

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Microsoft
Concurrent Sessions The Value of A/B Testing
Alan Page

Alan Page is a principal SDET—a fancy name for tester—on the Xbox console team at Microsoft. Edging up on twenty years in software testing, Alan has previously worked on a variety of Microsoft products including Windows, Windows CE, Internet Explorer, and Office Lync. He spent some time as Microsoft’s director of test excellence where he developed and ran technical training programs for testers throughout the company. Alan was the lead author of How We Test Software at Microsoft and contributed chapters on large-scale test automation to Beautiful Testing and Experiences of Test Automation: Case Studies of Software Test Automation. You can follow Alan on his blog or on Twitter @alanpage.

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Andy Palmer

Andy Palmer has sixteen years of experience, twelve in agile and lean methods. He has experience across multiple sectors, including telecommunications, investment banking, retail, and media. In addition to his experience in company-wide agile transformations, agile coaching, process reengineering, and software development, Andy specializes in effective communication and team psychology, which means he is as comfortable advising C-level executives as he is mentoring technical teams.

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Jeff Patton

Jeff Patton started in software development in the early ’90s as a project leader for a small, software product company where he learned that well-written code and fast delivery are not the secrets to success. What makes the difference is understanding your customer and creating a great product. In 2000 Jeff worked as a product manager adopting Extreme Programming, gaining a strong appreciation for the discipline that agile thinking brings to software development. He received the Agile Alliance’s Gordon Pask Award for contributions to agile development and authored User Story Mapping. Learn more about Jeff at jpattonassociates.com and agileproductdesign.com.

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Bob Payne

Bob Payne is the VP of enterprise consulting at LitheSpeed. An early adopter of Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, and SAFe, he has worked exclusively as a lean+agile transformation leader since 1999. Bob brings a pragmatic approach to the use of “best fit” approaches from across the spectrum of practices and processes. He believes that the most important piece of any transformation is to grow the skills in the teams to build and create a culture of continuous improvement. Bob is founder and chair of the AgileDC conference, speaks at industry conferences worldwide, hosts the AgileToolkit podcast and has produced more than 170 podcasts.

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Jeffery Payne

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 as one of the fastest growing private companies in the country. Prior to founding Coveros, Jeffery was chairman of the board, CEO, and co-founder of Cigital, Inc., a market leader in software security consulting. He has published more than thirty papers on software development and testing, and testified before Congress on issues of national importance, including intellectual property rights, cyber terrorism, and software quality.

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Pollyanna Pixton

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. A founding partner of Accelinnova, president of Evolutionary Systems, and director of the Institute for Collaborative Leadership, Pollyanna writes and speaks on topics of creating cultures of trust, leading collaboration, and business ethics. Her models are found in her book, Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility. Pollyanna co-founded the Agile Leadership Network and has chaired Leadership Summits in the US and England. Contact her at [email protected].

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Ken Pugh

A fellow consultant with Net Objectives, Ken Pugh helps companies transform into lean-agile organizations through training and coaching. His special interests are in communication (particularly effectively communicating requirements), delivering business value, and using lean principles to deliver high quality quickly. Ken trains, mentors, and testifies on technology topics from object-oriented design to Linux/Unix. He has written several programming books, including the 2006 Jolt Award winner Prefactoring and his latest Lean-Agile Acceptance Test Driven Development: Better Software Through Collaboration. Ken has helped clients from London to Boston to Sydney to Beijing to Hyderabad. He enjoys snowboarding, windsurfing, biking, and hiking the Appalachian Trail. Reach Ken at [email protected]

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Agile Artisans
Jared Richardson

Principal consultant and a member of the core team at Agile Artisans, Jared Richardson is a process coach who works with software teams to help them build excellent software. He sold his first software program in 1991 and has been immersed in software ever since. He helped create the GROWS methodology and has authored a number of books, including the best selling Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects and Career 2.0: Take Control of Your Life. He is a frequent speaker at software conferences and a thought leader in the agile space. Jared lives with his wife and children in North Carolina where they, quite by accident, became backyard chicken farmers.

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Rob Sabourin

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. Rob wrote I am a Bug!, the popular software testing children's book; works as an adjunct professor of software engineering at McGill University; and serves as the principle consultant (and president/janitor) of AmiBug.Com, Inc. Contact Rob at [email protected].

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Joe Schulz

As AVP of emerging technology at Orasi Software, Joe Schulz helps global organizations improve their development and QA processes around mobile device and application testing. A seasoned developer with more than twenty-five years of professional application development and quality assurance experience, Joe’s background spans a wide range of vertical industries and development technologies. He has an extensive background in non-traditional development that includes more than forty procedural, 4GL, CASE, OOAD/OOP, and agile products. Joe has received numerous professional certifications in information system methods, tools, and techniques as well as several accreditations for public speaking and agile facilitation.

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Al Shalloway

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. He is the primary author of Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility, Design Patterns Explained, Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams, and Essential Skills for the Agile Developer. Cofounder (although no longer affiliated) with Lean Kanban University, Al is a popular speaker at prestigious conferences worldwide.

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Raj Subramanian

Raj Subramanian, a former developer for a payroll processing company, moved to testing to focus on his passion.Raj currently works as a mobile test lead for a travel booking company. He actively contributes to the testing community by speaking at conferences, writing articles, blogging, and being directly involved in various testing-related activities. Raj serves on the board of a Cleveland conference group and is the co-organizer of a testers’ meet-up group. He currently resides in Chicago and can be reached at [email protected].

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Damian Synadinos

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. During the past ten years, Damian has focused primarily on teaching and leading testers and improving processes. Currently, he is the enterprise quality lead of metrics and reporting at a large Midwestern bank, helping to answer questions and tell stories about quality with data. In addition to testing, Damian enjoys improv, golf, poker, gaming, acting, cartooning, and spending time with his family.

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John Terzakis

John Terzakis has more than twenty-five years of experience developing, writing, and testing software. With Intel for sixteen years, John is currently a systems engineer with the Platform Engineering Group. He works with architects and engineers to help specify, verify, and manage requirements for Intel’s next generation of cellular modem products. John is a certified Intel instructor for internal requirements engineering courses. His prior experience includes director and manager roles with Shiva, Racal InterLan, and Dataproducts; and technical staff member at Bell Labs.

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PQA Testing
Mike Trites

A senior test consultant with PQA Testing Ltd., Mike Trites has more than a decade of software testing industry experience and holds multiple certifications, including ISTQB Advanced-Level Test Manager. As a consultant, Mike has worked with clients both small and large in a wide range of environments. He has helped deliver projects from web applications and database management software to financial software and video lottery systems. As a test manager, Mike has managed all aspects of the testing lifecycle and works with clients to help define, implement, and improve their internal testing processes. Find Mike at LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter @mike_trites.

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Technology Strategy Research
Peter Varhol

Peter Varhol is an accomplished technology speaker with presentations from software development to testing to application lifecycle topics. Peter writes extensively on software and technology topics. As a technology journalist and thought leader, he has authored hundreds of articles, white papers, and blog posts on software development, testing, and related topics. Visit Peter on his website petervarhol.com, his Cutting Edge Computing blog and on Twitter @pvarhol.

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Ken Whitaker

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. Ken has led commercial software teams at Software Publishing (remember Harvard Graphics?), Data General, embedded systems software companies, and enterprise software suppliers. He is an active PMI® registered education provider, Project Management Professional (PMP)® certified, and a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM). Ken authored Managing Software Maniacs, Principles of Software Development Leadership, and I’m Not God, I’m Just a Project Manager; editor of Better Software magazine; and creator of PM University™ and PM Chalkboard®.

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James Whittaker

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+. In 2012, James rejoined Microsoft to build the Bing Information Platform. Of his five books, two have been Jolt Award finalists. Follow James on Twitter @docjamesw.

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Professional Quality Assurance, Ltd.
Christin Wiedemann

After finishing her PhD in physics, Christin Wiedemann started working as a software developer. When asked to test on a project, she realized she had found her true vocation. Later Christin joined the Swedish test company AddQ Consulting where she worked as a tester, test lead, and trainer, giving courses on agile testing, test design, and exploratory testing throughout Europe. Christin is a co-creator of the exploratory testing approach xBTM. In her current role as co-CEO of Professional Quality Assurance (PQA), Christin’s primary objective is achieving delivery excellence, which is closely coupled with her continuing efforts to drive PQA’s research and method development.

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Robert Woods

An agile coach and delivery manager at MATRIX Resources, Robert Woods has spent years working with organizations on collaborative lean development, agile testing techniques, requirements analysis, project envisioning, relationship management, and agile leadership. Robert has helped organizations in the healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, insurance, and retail services industries. The creator of CLEAR (Collaborative, Lean, Evolving, Adaptable, Reportable) Portfolio Management concept, he has developed an entire agile adoption curriculum which includes training in practical agile, product ownership, agile team leadership and facilitation, executive agile, project envisioning and kickoff, and financial agility. Robert writes and speaks on agile processes and concepts.

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Peter Zimmerer

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. Contact Peter at [email protected]. [email protected].

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