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Speaker Index

Omar Bermudez

With more than fifteen years of experience helping people and organizations on three continents, Omar Bermudez has dramatically improved individual and organizational effectiveness at companies including Nokia, Equipetrol, Autodesk, Conexia, Woozworld, Kraft, Alcoa, and Seedbox. With experience in strategy, manufacturing, operations, and engineering, he gives clients powerful insights to produce profitable growth. A leader, mentor, and motivator who believes it is important to continually learn and grow, Omar is passionate about leadership development and helping people reach their full potential. Contact Omar at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @ocbermudez.

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SmartBear Software
Lorinda Brandon

In the high tech industry Lorinda Brandon has worked in management roles in customer service, quality assurance, and engineering. She has built and led numerous successful technical teams at companies, including RR Donnelley, EMC, Kayak Software, Exit41, and Intuit. The technical evangelist for API products at SmartBear Software, she is a strong advocate for women in IT, promoting the importance of closing the gender gap for upcoming generations. Follow her on Twitter @lindybrandon.

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ExxonMobil
Concurrent Sessions Usability Testing Goes Mobile
Susan Brockley

With more than twenty-four years of software engineering experience at ExxonMobil, Susan Brockley is passionate about quality assurance, testing, and requirements management. Although her current title is business analyst in the IT Center of Expertise, Susan spends most of her time consulting on projects about properly scoping work, completing requirements, and engaging the customer. Her credentials―Certified Software Quality Analyst and Certified ScrumMaster―hang on the wall, but Susan prefers to roll up her sleeves and coach teams with whatever they need to begin a successful journey.

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Beaumont Brush

The quality lead for hardware controls projects at Dematic, Inc., Beaumont Brush started his career fifteen years ago as a developer of natural language processing and information extraction technologies. Beaumont became a product manager for companies that leveraged these technologies to accomplish such tasks as intelligent patent searches, automatically matching résumés to job descriptions, and extracting event data from unstructured field intelligence reports. Since settling into quality assurance ten years ago, he has developed and implemented agile test processes and led test automation projects. Beaumont's primary interest and specialty are in tightly integrating quality practices into the development lifecycle.

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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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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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Christopher Davis

At Nike Christopher Davis directs the teams that are enabling continuous delivery through automated tools and processes. After more than fifteen years of experience leading and working on software engineering teams in the finance, travel, and healthcare industries, Christopher led the team that delivered the platform behind Nike+, the Nike+ FuelBand, and Nike+ Running. He is the author of Continuous Improvement: Measuring & Enhancing the Performance of Agile.

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Jane Fraser

As test director at Anki, Inc., Jane Fraser has managed test groups from 120 to 1 (herself). Her focus is developing testers into key members of the organization with real influence on the product and process. Jane has spent the past twenty years on projects including publishing programs, web/e-commerce, games, Big Data, mobile, e-ticketing, and robotics. Currently at Anki she is building a team that tests Anki DRIVE, which is battle racing for the real world. It ranked #2 in TIME magazine’s Top Ten Toys for 2014. Jane loves to “play” with hi-tech toys for a living. Learn more about Jane at LinkedIn.

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Conrad Fujimoto

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.

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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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Steve Hares

With more than thirty years of experience in the software industry, Steve Hares remembers keypunch machines, twenty-four hour batch turn-around time, and acoustic coupling modems. Steve has worked in multiple industries from networking and telecommunications to Internet security and eCommerce, as a developer, development manager, and QA leader. At eBay for six years running the quality engineering organization for the customer support technology group, Steve has built a world-class team from the ground up. It now tests everything from enterprise-wide products to desktop applications, from ETL files to native language IVRs.

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Brad Johnson

Cloud-computing pioneer Brad Johnson joined SOASTA in December 2008 to focus on changing IT services around quality and to bring new ways of thinking and testing to the quality market. With twenty years in IT, Brad’s former roles as head of test and monitoring products at Compuware, Mercury Interactive, and Borland prepared him well to disrupt the skeptical and established software quality market with updated approaches and technologies for continuous web and mobile testing. Contact Brad on Twitter @BradJohnsonsv.

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Kruchten Engineering Services, Ltd.
Concurrent Sessions Managing Technical Debt
Philippe Kruchten

Philippe Kruchten is professor of software engineering at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada, where he holds an NSERC chair in design engineering. He joined UBC in 2004 after a thirty-year career in industry, where he worked mostly with large software-intensive systems design in the domains of telecommunication, defense, aerospace, and transportation. Philippe’s current research interests are in software architecture (in particular, architectural decisions and the decision-making process), the evolution of large software and technical debt, and agile software development practices. He is the founder of Agile Vancouver.

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Infusionsoft
Concurrent Sessions The Power of Pair Testing
Kirk Lee

A QA professional for nearly twenty-five years, Kirk Lee has worked as a QA manager in the United States and overseas at several of the world's largest and most respected software companies. Kirk has worked on consumer software products and SaaS offerings. Currently he is a senior QA manager at Infusionsoft in Chandler, Arizona, where he leads a test department that operates in an agile/scrum development environment. As a certified ScrumMaster, Kirk is dedicated to agile principles and Scrum practices. He is especially passionate about defect prevention and getting QA involved at the very beginning of the development process.

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Professional Quality Assurance, Ltd.
Richard Lu

Richard Lu joined Professional Quality Assurance (PQA) Ltd. in 2013. Since then, he has been keenly exploring the world of software testing, continuously expanding his testing skills, and gaining experience with various projects and project environments. His passion for testing has driven him to consider ways to engage junior testers through mentoring and training to make them valued team members.

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Gerard Meszaros

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. His book xUnit Test Patterns—Refactoring Test Code won a Jolt Productivity Award in the Best Technical Book category.

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Prasad MK

Prasad is responsible for TCS' assurance solutions and consultancy for the Telecom, Media and HiTech industry verticals.  He has managed and worked on transformation projects and delivered expected business results through best in class Quality Assurance & Testing practices. Currently, he leads Quality Assurance & Testing Sales for North America.  Prasad's area of interest include exploring innovative methods to transform QA & Testing organizations into a Value Center.  He has presented on Digital Assurance, Gamification at recent Star East and Star West conferences.  He has also published articles on DevOps Assurance in Stickyminds.com and champions QA & Testing forums at TCS to help continue to foster innovation in this arena.

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Electric Cloud
Tanay Nagjee

A software engineer for more than five years, Tanay Nagjee has developed several core features of a highly scalable orchestration/automation platform. As a solutions architect, Tanay tackles complex software delivery problems every day. He works with software companies of all sizes, each with a unique delivery lifecycle and a myriad of tools. Needs common to these companies are automation, orchestration, and acceleration. Tanay shares his experiences with the product team to incorporate customer feedback into the product, which contributes to the architecture of a product suite that is both flexible and intuitive.

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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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J.B. Rainsberger

J.B. Rainsberger (jbrains.ca) helps software companies better satisfy their customers and the businesses they support. Through the years, J.B. has learned how to write valuable software and how to overcome many of his social deficiencies. He has built a life that he enjoys—traveling the world, sharing what he's learned, and helping other people get more of what they want out of work and out of their lives. J.B. provides one-on-one consulting, which lets him help even more people get the advice they need without a large up-front investment. He lives in Atlantic Canada with his wife Sarah and two cats.

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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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Testrics Inc.
Matta Saikali

Matta is the president and founder of Testrics Inc. a software testing company based in Montreal, Canada. Matta has more than twenty years experience in internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) testing and his testing experience covers more than 30 languages including European, Asian, Arabic, Farsi, etc. An invited speaker at many international conferences. Matta is an instructor for many i18n and l10n courses that deals with subjects tailored specifically for testing professionals.

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HomeAdvisor
Concurrent Sessions Automate REST API Testing
Eric Smith

Eric Smith is an agile evangelist software leader with more than fifteen years of experience leading software teams in developing highly complex projects using risk-based, feedback-driven processes. Eric strongly believes that a trust-based, purpose-driven culture produces the best results. He has led software projects and process improvements across organizations in the B2B, Big Data, web, and mobile application spaces. For the past eight years, Eric has been leading software delivery teams for HomeAdvisor, focusing his work on the delivery of new products and mobile application products.

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Ron Smith

A senior quality engineer at Intuit for fifteen years, Ron Smith enjoys being the first one to test a new product or feature, learning how it works, and finding creative ways to test it. Ron’s other passions in testing include creating automated tests, building testability into the product, and improving the user experience. He strongly believes that critical thinking and understanding how users will interact with the product are key components of effective testing.

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Software Quality Engineering
Michael Sowers

Mike Sowers 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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Neotys
Concurrent Sessions Testing Mobile App Performance
Brad Stoner

Brad Stoner is a senior performance engineer at Neotys. Previously, he managed the load and performance team at H&R Block where he spent seven years leading his five-person team in the pursuit of improved application performance and quality. Brad and his team managed the performance testing process for more than fifty projects annually. He founded Sandbreak Digital Solutions, a consulting company specializing in web application performance testing, web page optimization, front end optimization, capacity testing, infrastructure validation, and cloud testing. In his twelve years of IT experience, Brad has held roles from systems engineering to operations management.

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Polarion Software
Concurrent Sessions Testing the Internet of Things
Regg Struyk

With twenty years of commercial software development and testing experience, Regg Struyk has held many different positions ranging from the head of technical product management for Agfa HealthCare to, most recently, product evangelist for Polarion QA. Regg has developed for several software testing tools including test integrity, iTest, and Polarion QA. Dedicated to the domain of test management, Regg is continually analyzing testing trends and their potential impact on the discipline of software testing.

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Ioan Todoran

Ioan Todoran is currently working in London for Expedia Affiliate Network, an Expedia.com brand. He started out as a game tester,  working on a large number of Nintendo DS, PC and Wii projects. Afterwards, he moved towards testing applications from the betting and financial industry. Was also involved in a start-up, but one of his biggest challenges was to build, train and lead a testing team for a software outsourcing company. Ioan strives to improve his technical skills, whilst getting know the business side of things on the projects he works on. He's interested in the ever-chanding role of testing within the software development life cycle, in learning new things and then getting to challenge them.

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Denver Automation and Quality Engineering
Melissa Tondi

Melissa Tondi has spent most of her career working within testing teams—concentrating on functional, performance, security, and mobile testing techniques. In her current roles, she is the founder of Denver Mobile and Quality (DMAQ) and, at AOL, she is assisting agile teams to continuously improve the design, build, test, and delivery of quality software.

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ALSAC/St Jude Children's Research Hospital
Joy Toney

Joy Toney is a lead analyst–total quality management & change enablement, for Information Technology Services at ALSAC/St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital where she focuses on best practices, standards, and continuous improvement. Previously, Joy was a business analysis manager for a team of IT analysts. She has more than twelve years of experience in resource management, project management, requirements elicitation and documentation, systems design and testing, functional design/planning, process improvement, and performance analysis and reporting. Joy is founder and past president of the Greater Memphis IIBA Chapter.

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Jim Trentadue

With more than sixteen years of experience as a coordinator and manager in software testing, Jim Trentadue has filled various testing roles focused on test execution, automation, management, environment management, standards deployment, and test tool implementation. Jim has presented at numerous industry conferences including the STAREAST, STARWEST, Better Software Conference East, and IBM Rational Software Development Conference. Jim has been a guest speaker at the University of South Florida’s software testing class, mentoring students on the testing industry and discussing trends for establishing future job searches and continued training.

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Philips Healthcare
Concurrent Sessions Root Cause Analysis for Testers
Jan van Moll

Passionate about product quality and testing, Jan van Moll is a recognized industry leader in the development, verification, and validation of software-intensive products—from consumer electronics to regulated industries like automotive and medical devices. Currently, Jan is a senior quality manager in Philips Healthcare-MRI, the Netherlands. An independent senior forensic expert in special investigation boards, he has been involved in numerous root cause analysis efforts worldwide on critical incidents that had severe effects on health, safety, security, or general welfare. Jan’s professional drive is to build bridges between testing and other disciplines with the goal to have testers reach out and grow their potential to quality management in general.

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Al Wagner

Al Wagner is currently a testing evangelist with IBM, driving thought leadership, strategic initiatives, and tangible solutions with a specific focus on quality management, test automation, and service virtualization. In his fifteen years of practical IT field experience, Al has assisted, supported, mentored, and enabled teams with their IT application infrastructure, development, implementation, and operations challenges. A frequent conference speaker on software quality principles and techniques, Al has coauthored the IBM Service Virtualization for Dummies book and authored numerous papers on quality management and test automation.

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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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