Speaker Index

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 ten years, he has traveled the world teaching rapid software testing skills and serving as an expert witness on court cases involving software testing.

CTO of PerfTestPlus and recognized worldwide as a thought-leader in software system performance and testing, Scott Barber describes himself as a “tester, author, speaker, disrupter, and dad.” Scott is the author of Web Load Testing for Dummies and co-/contributing author of Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications, Beautiful Testing, and How to Reduce the Cost of Testing.

Richard Bender has over forty-five years experience in software with a primary focus on quality assurance and testing. He has consulted internationally to large and small corporations, government agencies, and the military. Richard’s work has included a wide variety of application classes and technology bases from embedded systems to super computer-based systems—and everything in between—consulting to both vendors and IT departments alike. He has been active in establishing industry standards for software quality and is a frequent speaker at conferences, universities, and corporate events.

Jennifer Bonine is a VP of global delivery and solutions for tap|QA Inc., a global company that specializes in strategic solutions for businesses. Jennifer began her career in consulting, implementing large ERP solutions. She has held executive level positions leading development, quality assurance and testing, organizational development, and process improvement teams for Fortune 500 companies in several domains.

A lead consultant at ThoughtWorks, Chris Bushell has a wide variety of roles including software developer, architect, test automation specialist, agile coach, and trainer. Chris has more than ten years of industry experience working in finance, retail, telecoms, and mobile in the U.K., Australia, and the U.S. Passionate about software development process and technology, he is an advocate of using open source software for building simple solutions to complex problems. Chris is an active member of the local software development community wherever he's based.

A software test consultant and trainer, quality architect, and agile coach, Paul Carvalho helps his clients build test-infected development teams with a holistic and congruent approach to quality. With twenty-five years of building software in many different industries, Paul is considered an expert in software testing and is part of the context-driven software testing community.

A consultant, lecturer, author, and test manager, Rick Craig has led numerous teams of testers on both large and small projects. In his twenty-five 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.

As a senior test consultant at Valori, Derk-Jan de Grood specializes in getting more out of testing by focusing on the value chain, business-IT alignment, and the team’s visibility. Being a passionate speaker, Derk-Jan is at home at major testing conferences where he tries to inspire people and help improve the test profession.

A tester and ScrumMaster at codecentric, Pascal Dufour has a passion for agile projects where he implements pragmatic test strategies combining agile and context-driven testing. Pascal has more than ten years of experience at large international companies with different types of testing from embedded software to system integration. Enthusiastic and creative, he tries to make testing more fun, making his work visual and as simple as possible. Pascal helps team members improve their efforts in Scrum emphasizing ethics, commitment, and transparency.

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.

William Gens is a senior test engineer at Dealogic in New York City. He has been involved with software quality for more than thirty years at Credit Suisse/First Boston, Merrill Lynch/Bank of America, Dell Computer, and numerous joint ventures with IBM in the financial services Industry. With a passion for software quality and the integrity of the quality assurance process, William prides himself on being one of the original quality frontiersmen in financial services software development and testing.

In testing for more than thirty years, Dorothy Graham is coauthor of four books—Software Inspection, Software Test Automation, Foundations of Software Testing, and Experiences of Test Automation: Case Studies of Software Test Automation. Dot was a founding member of the ISEB Software Testing Board, a member of the working party that developed the first ISTQB Foundation Syllabus, and served on the boards of conferences and publications in software testing.

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 system (avionics and auto), spacecraft, mobile-smart devices, IT, and attack testing of smart phones.

An independent software test consultant and teacher, Paul Holland has more than sixteen years of hands-on testing and test management experience, primarily at Alcatel-Lucent where he led a transformation of the testing approach for two product divisions, making them more efficient and effective. As a test manager and tester, Paul focused on exploratory testing, test automation, and improving testing techniques.

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 US, 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.

Karen N. Johnson is a software test consultant, working on-site and remotely to help her clients build testing teams and strengthen their testing practice. Karen is considered an expert in software testing and has been part of the context-driven software testing community for a number of years. She is a frequent speaker at testing conferences; a contributing author to the book, Beautiful Testing; and co-founder of WREST, the Workshop on Regulated Software Testing. Karen has published numerous articles and blogs about her experiences with software testing.

Cem Kaner is a professor of software engineering at Florida Institute of Technology and director of FIT’s Center for Software Testing Education & Research. Cem teaches and researches in software engineering—software testing, software metrics, and computer law and ethics. In his career, he has studied and worked in areas of psychology, law, programming, testing, technical writing, sales, applying what he learned to the central problem of software satisfaction. Cem has done substantial work on the development of the law of software quality.

Jonathan Kohl is an internationally recognized consultant, technical leader, and popular speaker based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The founder and principal consultant of Kohl Concepts, Inc., Jonathan assists teams with testing, helps companies define and implement their ideas in products, coaches practitioners as they develop software on teams, and works with leaders to help them define and implement their strategic visions.

In software quality for seventeen years and currently a quality coach for Agile Velocity (AgileVelocity.com), Dena Laterza became an agile enthusiast five years ago when the director of development brought in agile coaches. The coaching succeeded—and so did the project! Dena has worked on applications in the medical, lead management, contract management, project management, retail, and video-conferencing domains—with both commercial and open-source test automation tools.

Australian software testing professional, teacher, and journalist Thomas McCoy has worked in the IT industry for more than two decades. Much of this time was spent as a software developer and IT manager with Australian government agencies. Wanting to make a greater contribution to software quality, Thomas re-oriented his career into the emerging discipline of software testing and has been an enthusiastic promoter of the profession ever since.

Jamie Mitchell has more than thirty years of experience developing and testing both hardware and software. In 1991, Jamie moved from hardware to the dark side—software. He was a pioneer in the test automation field, working with a variety of vendor, open source, and custom-built tools since Windows 3.0. Jamie's specialty is increasing the productivity of automation and test teams through innovative ideas and custom tool extensions. In addition, Jamie provides training, mentoring, and expert technical support in all aspects of testing and automation.

Chief technology officer and a cofounder of LeanDog, Jeff “Cheezy” Morgan has been coaching teams on agile and lean techniques since 2004 with a focus on the engineering practices. For the past three years Cheezy has experienced great success and recognition for his work focused on helping teams adopt Acceptance Test-driven Development using Cucumber. He has authored several popular Ruby gems used by software testers throughout the world, teaches Cucumber classes and workshops, and is the author of the book, Cucumber & Cheese: A Testers Workshop.

Carol Oliver is a doctoral student in the Center and leader of the HiVAT project. She has more than a decade of experience as a tester, most recently as Lead QA Analyst supporting infrastructure technology services at Stanford University. For most of her career, Carol has been the lone tester supporting more than a dozen database-driven middleware and web applications, all of which needed to cooperate with each other and several different infrastructure services simultaneously.

As Sr. Director of Engagement at QA InfoTech, Rajini Padmanaban leads the engagement and relationship management for some of QA InfoTech's largest and most strategic accounts. Rajini has more than twelve years of professional experience, primarily in the software quality assurance area.

Dale Perry has more than thirty-six 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 years, he has presented at numerous industry conferences on development and testing.

Anna Russo is an application lifecycle management process consultant with Imaginet, a consulting services firm specializing in helping companies improve their application lifecycle processes through the use of Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Test Manager. Anna is responsible for helping customers improve their software processes by properly implementing Microsoft's Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Test Manager tools in a manner suitable for their organization.

For more than sixteen years Laura Salazar has been in IT as project manager, QA manager, and consultant. Her experience includes testing applications for the banking, insurance, mobile, telephony, media, and retail industries. Laura has implemented global testing strategies, but her real passion is automation and performance. A Certified Tester, ScrumMaster, and testing specialist, Laura manages the Testing Career Path and Training Program at Softtek. She participates in the development and implementation of testing methodologies, frameworks, and testing strategies.

Michael Stahl is a software validation architect at Intel, working with a team that validates Intel's graphics hardware drivers. In this role, Michael defines testing strategies and work methodologies for test teams, and tests part of the product himself—the work he enjoys most. As a twenty-two year veteran and senior engineer, he has been witness to what works—and what doesn’t—in test strategies, communications, and automation. An avid teacher, Michael enjoys sharing his observations with others.

Jim Trentadue has more than fourteen years of experience as a coordinator/manager in the software testing field. Jim’s various roles in testing have focused on test execution, automation, management, environment management, standards deployment, and test tool implementation. In the area of offshore testing, he has worked with multiple large firms on developing and coordinating cohesive relationships.

In QA since 1996 in the automotive, banking, finance, and utilities industries, Lindiwe Vinson is director of technology at digital marketing agency Organic, Inc. Her diverse experience provides a strong working knowledge of emerging platforms and technologies, web analytics, test planning, resourcing and contingency planning, mobile device and mobile application testing, defect reporting, and performance testing. Throughout her career, Lindiwe has had the opportunity to build and lead global teams both internally and offshore for testing purposes.

Steve Weisfeldt is a senior performance engineer at Neotys, a provider of load testing software for web applications. In the load and performance testing space since 1999, Steve’s expertise lies in enabling organizations to optimize their ability to develop, test, and launch high-quality applications efficiently, on-time, and on-budget. Prior to Neotys, Steve was president of Engine 1 Consulting, a services firm specializing in all facets of test automation.

A fellow software craftsman at LeanDog, Levi Wilson loves nothing more than writing clean, maintainable, and testable code. For the past year he has been working on the mobile development team at LeanDog and has been very active in contributing to various open-source testing frameworks for Android applications. With this experience, Levi has recently focused on teaching others how to effectively test their mobile applications. He coauthored an Android testing framework of his own.