Speaker Index

With more than eighteen years of experience in software testing, Jon Bach has held technical and managerial positions in companies including Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. In his current role as director of Live Site Quality for eBay, Jon is dedicated to building “end-to-end” tests (activity flows) in eBay’s core sites to discover important bugs that threaten its core business. He is most notable for creating, with his brother James, Session-Based Test Management, a method to manage and report exploratory testing.

A systems software developer for thirty-two years, specializing in the MVS mainframe and website environment, David Best has extensive advocacy experience with information technologies and workplace strategies for disabled employees. David is responsible for designing, developing, and implementing e-business data analytics and reporting solutions in the travel and transportation sector.

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. Michael is a leader in the context-driven software testing movement with twenty years of experience testing, developing, managing, and writing about software. Currently, he leads DevelopSense, a Toronto-based consultancy.

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. Lee has developed and taught numerous training courses on software development and testing issues and is a well-known speaker with Software Quality Engineering. Lee presents at software conferences in the United States and abroad.

President and senior consultant of Intellectica Systems Inc., Conrad Fujimoto is an information technology professional with thirty-five years of experience in the education, government, financial, and utility sectors. An accomplished educator and author of several courses, Conrad delivers courses in software testing, relational database technology, data modeling, application programming, business analysis, and facilitation techniques. He lives in Mississauga, just outside the greater Toronto area.

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.

Quality assurance manager for Turner Broadcasting System’s Audience & Multi-Platform Technologies (AMPT) group, Eric Jacobson manages the test team responsible for Turner’s sales and strategic planning data warehouse, and its broadcast traffic system. Eric was previously a test lead at Turner Broadcasting, responsible for testing the traffic system that schedules all commercials and programming on Turner’s ten domestic cable networks, including CNN, TNT, TBS, and Cartoon Network. Prior to joining TBS, he was a tester at Lucent Technologies.

Keith Klain is the head of Barclays Capital Global Test Centre, which provides functional and non-functional testing services to the investment banking and wealth management businesses. With more than fifteen years of multinational experience managing enterprise-wide testing programs, Keith has built and managed global test teams for financial services and IT consulting firms in the US, UK, and Asia Pacific. He also was a software quality management practice director for an international technology consultancy.

Iain McCowatt is a context-driven tester, test manager, and automator whose experience and passion for testing spans multiple industries over more than a decade. As a test practice lead and program test manager with CGI in Atlantic Canada, Iain specializes in providing clients with innovative solutions to difficult testing problems and in building teams that place an emphasis on the skill of the tester. Having been both a customer and provider of testing, he takes a particular interest in the value that testing can provide.

An independent software development consultant and trainer, Gerard Meszaros has more than thirty years of experience in software and more than a decade of experience in agile methods. Gerard is an expert in test automation patterns, refactoring of software and tests, and design for testability. He has applied automated unit and acceptance testing on projects ranging from full-on eXtreme Programming to traditional waterfall development in a wide range of industries. Gerard is an expert in the implementation and customization of agile methods such as Scrum, lean, and eXtreme Programming.

Gary Mogyorodi has over thirty-three years of experience in the computing industry. Gary consults, trains, and mentors in software testing, specializing in Requirements-Based Testing. Some of his customers include Siemens, Cendant, Rockwell Automation, Boeing, EMC, IBM, LexisNexis, RBC, H&R Block, CIBC, TELUS, CGI, FiLogix, and Home Hardware. Gary is a Certified Tester, and Advanced Level Functional Tester with the ASTQB. He has managed testing efforts, developed testing methodologies, and created standards and procedures for quality assurance and testing.

Chris Munroe is a 13-year QA professional and oversees uTest customer testing delivery. Before he came to uTest, Chris was the Global Director of QA at British Telecom where he managed a large team of QA resources from around the world.

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.

Founder and principal consultant at Testware Associates, Inc., Leslie Segal has consulted and taught about software quality for more than twenty years. Specializing in performance testing and test automation, Leslie has worked with organizations worldwide to implement valid, reusable, efficient, and effective performance testing and test automation and to abolish record-and-playback. She has used a variety of tools and worked on projects in the finance, entertainment, eCommerce, publishing, education, pharmaceutical, travel, telecommunications, government, and medical device industries.

An IBM senior consultant with nearly thirty years of IT experience, Dan Shire is the IBM Canada Global Services team leader for accessibility. For the past twelve years Dan has focused on improving the user experience and accessibility of his client’s websites. He has designed, tested, and delivered engaging and accessible websites for a range of private sector businesses including large Canadian banks, as well as designing and testing multiple provincial and federal government sites and applications used by millions of Canadians.

George Wilkinson has more than twenty-one years of experience in the field of software testing and quality assurance. George spent many of those years managing test teams and evolving the testing process from small businesses to large corporate companies. Having worked in a variety of industries during his career, he has enthused, mentored, managed, and inspired many test professionals within the industry.