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Speaker Index

Bob Aiello

Technical editor 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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Sanjiv Augustine

Sanjiv Augustine is an entrepreneur, industry-leading agile and lean expert, author, speaker, management consultant and trainer.  With 25 years in the industry, Sanjiv has served as a trusted advisor over the past 15 years to executives and management at leading firms including:  Capital One, The Capital Group, CNBC, Comcast, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, General Dynamics, HCA Healthcare, The Motley Fool, National Geographic, Nationwide Insurance, Walmart and Samsung. Sanjiv is the author of the book Managing Agile Projects (Prentice Hall 2005) and several publications including “Transitioning to Agile Project Management” and “The Lean-Agile PMO: Using Lean Thinking to Accelerate Agile Project Delivery.” He is the Chair of the Agile Alliance’s Agile Executive Forum and the founder and moderator of the Lean Startup in the Enterprise Meetup.  Sanjiv was also a founder and advisory board member of the Agile Leadership Network (ALN), and a founder member of the Project Management Institute’s Agile Community of Practice.

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Arlen Bankston

Arlen Bankston is an established leader in the application and evolution of Agile software development processes such as Scrum, Kanban and Extreme Programming, as well as process management methodologies such as Lean and Six Sigma. He is a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, Certified ScrumMaster® Trainer and Certified Scrum Product Owner. He has sixteen years of experience, beginning in product design, where he leveraged principles of information architecture, interaction design and usability to develop innovative products that met customers’ expressed and unspoken needs. Arlen has led Agile and Lean deployment and managed process improvement projects at clients such as Marriott, Capital One, Neustar, CCP Games, T. Rowe Price, Freddie Mac, and the Armed Forces Benefits Association. Arlen led novel work to combine Lean Six Sigma process improvement methods with Agile execution to dramatically improve both the speed and quality of business results, as well as early 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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Mike Benkovich

Mike Benkovich brings it all—energy, laughter, and a contagious passion for coding—with him. In a career that has taken him from minion to business owner, from database administrator to developer, from author to evangelist, Mike has seen it all. In more than twenty-five years of working in the technology industry, he has been part of the latest waves to sweep the industry. Whether delivering MSDN events live or webcast presentations, on the developer resource site BenkoTips or his blog, Mike brings enthusiasm for tools and an energy for the search to find a better way. Follow Mike on Twitter @mbenko.

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Siraj Berhan

Across all lines of business at the Royal Bank of Canada, Siraj Berhan leads the consulting, training, and coaching of various agile teams. Since 2002 when he became addicted to applying agile development methodologies, Siraj has championed being agile with a goal of making teams, products, and businesses flourish. He has trained hundreds of practitioners and managers on agile development through various multi-day courses covering agile at an enterprise level. With his passion for driving agility through technical excellence, Siraj has trained dozens of developers on XP engineering practices. Follow him on Twitter @SirajBerhan, contact him at [email protected], and read his blog.

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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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Agile For All
Jake Calabrese

An enterprise agile systems coach and agile trainer with Agile For All, Jake Calabrese has more than twenty years of IT experience in a variety of roles and industries. Jake believes that agile must be more than simply ceremonies and practices. We must dig into the more difficult challenges of strengthening people’s relationships and teams, their ability to work together, and their culture. Valuing people is the key to organizations thriving in an increasingly complex, fast, and social world. And beyond that, we need to value relationships!

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Intel ISecG
Noopur Davis

As VP of global quality at Intel ISecG, Noopur Davis heads product quality, enterprise agility, product security, and interoperability. Noopur started her career as an embedded systems programmer, made the journey into management, and, while leading a complex project with teams scattered worldwide, started thinking about organizations, people, process, and quality.  This led to a change in direction from product engineering to product development excellence: the people, process, and leadership aspects essential to creating awesome products.

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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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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 an independent consultant working in software product integrity, testing, verification, and validation. For more than thirty-five years Jon has worked in software engineering, particularly testing, supporting projects which include control systems (avionics and auto), spacecraft, IoT, mobile-smart devices, and attack testing for smart phones. He authored Software Test Attacks to Break Mobile and Embedded Devices; has presented hundreds of classes and more than fifty conference presentations; and written numerous articles. Jon is an editor for ISO, IEEE, and OMG standards.

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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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Elisabeth Hendrickson

Elisabeth Hendrickson, better known as testobsessed, has been kicking around the software industry for a couple of decades in a variety of roles including tester, developer, and agile enabler. Author of Explore It!, Elisabeth is known for her Google Tech Talk on agile testing and popular test heuristics Cheatsheet. In 2010 she won the prestigious Gordon Pask Award from the Agile Alliance. After more than a decade as an independent consultant, in 2012 Elisabeth joined Pivotal, the company where she first learned extreme programming. She is now a senior director of engineering.

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Andy Hunt

One of the seventeen authors of the Agile Manifesto, Andy Hunt is a programmer-turned-consultant, author, and publisher. After working at large Fortune 500 companies and small startups, Andy and Dave Thomas joined to write the seminal software development book The Pragmatic Programmer. Founders of The Pragmatic Programmers, Dave and Andy are well known as early supporters of the agile movement. The books published by their Pragmatic Bookshelf help keep developers at the top of their game. Andy has authored nine books, including Pragmatic Thinking & Learning and Learn to Program with Minecraft Plugins: Create Flaming Cows in Java for the kids. Follow Andy on Twitter @PragmaticAndy.

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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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Gallop Solutions
Kalyana Konda

Kalyana Konda is the president and global head of Gallop Solutions Inc., a Philadelphia-based software testing services company. With seventeen years of experience, Kalyana started his career in software testing, has led large QA teams of more than 2,000 people at AppLabs, and has held QA leadership roles with Virtusa and BaaN. He has a rare mix of high technical understanding and a pragmatic approach to testing services delivery.

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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 Enterprises
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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Ultimate Software
Mike Longin

Mike Longin is a certified ScrumMaster, agile coach, and manager of software engineering at Ultimate Software. For more than ten years, Mike has helped pioneer agile implementations of Scrum, kanban, and Scrumban for the Ultimate’s enterprise needs. As part of these efforts, he has led a metrics-first approach to agile leadership, letting the data lead the team—not the other way around. Mike has developed web automation tools that combine agile principles with automation needs, culminating as co-lead on the Simple Web Automation Toolkit project.

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Michael Mah

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, and other Fortune 100 companies. He is the director of the Benchmarking Practice at the Cutter Consortium in the United States. A private pilot, Michael lives in the mountains of western Massachusetts. Reach Michael at qsma.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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TechWell Corp.
Dale Perry

Dale Perry has more than thirty-eight years of experience in information technology as a programmer/analyst, database administrator, project manager, development manager, tester, and test manager. Dale’s project experience includes large-system development and conversions, distributed systems, and both web-based and client/server applications. A professional instructor for more than twenty-four years, he has presented at numerous industry conferences on development and testing. With TechWell for nineteen years, Dale has specialized in training and consulting on testing (test design and planning), inspections and reviews, and other testing and quality-related topics.

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Jeff Pierce

Jeff Pierce has more than 20 years of experience in software engineering management, specializing in program, project, and software quality assurance management. Jeff is also experienced in building technical teams that are rapidly able to implement solutions and deliver business value. More recently, Jeff has focused on Agile project management and, as a certified Agile ScrumMaster, has coached and mentored several client companies over the last 10 years in successfully introducing Agile practices and methodologies as part of their Agile adoption and quality software delivery.

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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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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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Chris Riley

A well-known DevOps expert, Chris Riley has spent twelve years helping organizations transition from traditional development practices to a more modern set of culture, processes, and tooling to increase software release frequency and quality. Founder and DevOps analyst at Fixate IO, he was most recently a GigaOM research analyst. He is a frequent O’Reilly author, regular speaker at various industry conferences worldwide, and subject matter expert in DevOps strategy and culture.

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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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Ultimate Software
Prateek Singh

Prateek Singh has been leading and working on agile teams for the past ten years. Starting with XP, then Scrum, and now kanban, Prateek has gained a breadth and depth of knowledge regarding agile techniques, practices, and implementation principles. At Ultimate Software, he conducts training and coaching for teams regarding kanban and lean principles. In his career, Prateek has played the role of software engineer, ScrumMaster, and manager of software engineering.

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Michael Sowers

Michael Sowers, CIO and senior consultant at TechWell, has more than twenty-five years of practical experience as a global quality and test leader of internationally distributed test teams across multiple industries. Mike is a senior consultant, skilled in working with both large and small organizations to improve their software development, testing, and delivery approaches. He has worked with companies including Fidelity Investments, PepsiCo, FedEx, Southwest Airlines, Wells Fargo, ADP, and Lockheed to improve software quality, reduce time to market, and decrease costs. With his passion for helping teams deliver software faster, better, and cheaper, Mike has mentored and coached senior software leaders, small teams, and direct contributors worldwide.

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Jason St-Cyr

Jason St-Cyr is a solution architect with more than fifteen years of experience in the software development field. His primary focus is in ALM, Sitecore, infrastructure, system integrations, software architecture, and stopping slap shots. Having spent his career delivering .NET solutions with a focus on quality assurance, deployment processes, and ALM tools, Jason’s past four years have brought his experience to Sitecore solutions as a consultant with Nonlinear Digital.

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Erik van Veenendaal

A leading international consultant, trainer, and recognized expert in software testing, Erik van Veenendaal (erikvanveenendaal.nl) is the founder of Improve Quality Services BV, a company that specializes in testing, requirements engineering, and quality management. Erik is the author of a number of books and papers, a core developer of the TMap testing methodology and the TMMi improvement model, a participant in the International Requirements Engineering Board working parties, currently on the TMMi Foundation board, and a frequent speaker at international testing conferences. For his major contribution to the field of testing, Erik received the 2007 European Testing Excellence Award.

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Anders Wallgren

Anders Wallgren is chief technology officer of Electric Cloud. Anders brings with him more than twenty-five years of in-depth experience designing and building commercial software. Prior to joining Electric Cloud, Anders held executive positions at Aceva, Archistra, and Impresse. He held management positions at Macromedia, Common Ground Software, and Verity where he played critical technical leadership roles in delivering award winning technologies such as Macromedia’s Director 7 and various Shockwave products.

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James Watt

The DevOps lead for the Buyer Experience organization driving Dell.com, James Watt has been working within Dell for the past eight years as a technologist, product development lead, and Scrum coach. With his help, Dell has shipped Dell Active Systems Manager, the Dell Plug-In for VMWare vCenter, and the Dell Update Packages catalog. James has been highly involved in helping promote transformative change in Dell’s organization and has presented Dell experiences on large-scale agile release planning for Agile Austin.

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