Conference Speakers

A passionate, motivated, and driven IT professional, Annette Ash has thirty years of experience helping to build software development teams with an emphasis in software quality. She is currently a coach and trainer with SolutionsIQ. In the testing field Annette has seen and been a part of the constant...Read more

James Bach is founder and principal consultant of Satisfice, Inc., a software testing and quality assurance company. In the 1980s, 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...Read more

Israel-based Eran Bachar is the senior product manager for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) business process testing (BPT) and Sprinter. With ten years’ experience managing complex software development projects, Eran established the dev/test at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise to ensure quality as part of development, using top-end QA and dev practices combined with DevOps...Read more

The director of test engineering at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center, Matt Barbour has served in a number of engineering roles at the company since 2007. He and his teams are responsible for ensuring a top notch customer experience at Comcast’s large scale for set-top boxes, mobile devices, and...Read more

Richard Bender has more than 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...Read more

The manager of quality assurance engineering at American Greetings, David Bialek is responsible for directing the quality assurance effort for all software development. During his sixteen year IT career, he was a QA consultant for Compuware and senior...Read more

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 her career, she has...Read more

With fifteen years of industry experience, Glenn Buckholz leads continuous integration and deployment automation efforts at Coveros. His career began as a consultant implementing automated test frameworks and introducing the concept of change management to many, many projects. Glenn then decided to become a part of honest society and settled...Read more

Hans Buwalda has been working with information technology since his high school years. In his career, Hans has gained experience as a developer, manager, and principal consultant for companies and organizations worldwide. He was a pioneer of the keyword approach to testing and automation, now widely used throughout the industry....Read more

A test automation architect for a large Fortune 100 company, Joe Colantonio has more than fifteen years of automation and performance testing experience. Joe is the founder of the popular test automation blog, joecolantonio.com, where he...Read more

With more than forty 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 TechWell, Lee has developed and taught numerous training courses on software development and testing issues,...Read more

For more than seventeen years, David Dang has been a leader in the test automation industry. As VP of automated solutions for Greensboro, NC-based Zenergy Technologies, David spearheads the development of advanced frameworks that emphasize reusability and reduce maintenance efforts. He is an expert in all major commercial automation tools...Read more

Independent quality and testing consultant Isabel Evans has more than thirty years of IT experience in quality management and testing in the financial, communications, and software sectors. Her quality management work focuses on encouraging IT teams and customers to work together via flexible processes designed and tailored by the teams...Read more

Jane Fraser has managed tests groups from just herself to a team of 120. Her focus is in developing testers into key members of the community with true influence on the product and process. Jane has spent the past twenty years on a span of projects including publishing programs, web/e-commerce,...Read more

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....Read more

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. A certified ScrumMaster and agile coach, Julie has more than twenty years of experience as a developer, DBA, project manager, head...Read more

In software testing for more than forty years, Dorothy Graham is a popular and entertaining speaker at conferences and seminars worldwide, attending STAR conferences since the first one in 1992. She is coauthor of four books—Software Inspection, Software Test Automation, Foundations of Software Testing, and Experiences of Test Automation—and is...Read more

Michael Harris has more than thirty years of broad management experience in the IT field—in R&D, development, production, business, and academia—and held numerous senior executive positions in Fortune 500 companies. An author and speaker on a range of topics related to the value visualization of IT, Michael is...Read more

Brian Hicks is a software engineer, development manager, and technical architect with over 15 years of hands-on experience designing and developing software using core Java, web services, and related technologies in both the commercial and public sectors. He is also a Certified ScrumMaster® and has experience implementing agile processes, leading...Read more

Chinmayanand Jha is a Senior Consultant of Test Data Management (TDM) at TCS with over 9 years of experience. He has led multiple global TDM consulting initiatives to assess process maturity, identify improvement opportunities and provide recommendations. Chinmay is currently responsible for the delivery of the Test Data Management functions...Read more

Ardita Karaj is a passionate Toronto-based agile coach, trainer, change agent, and consultant. Working at EPAM Systems, Ardita brings more than fifteen years of software development experience from different commercial and public organizations. In the past few years, she has focused on process improvement...Read more

Keith Klain is the Executive Director, Head of Software Quality Management for Tekmark Global Solutions, a full service telecoms and technology consultancy provider. For the last 20 years Keith has built software quality management and testing teams for global financial services and IT...Read more

Senior automation developer Chris Loder leads the automation framework team at Ottawa-based Halogen Software. With two decades in automation and automation framework development, Chris has worked with all the greats―Visual Test, WinRunner, Quick Test Pro, Rational Functional Tester, SilkTest—and is now working with Selenium. He has led...Read more

Brian Long has been a consultant and software developer for more than thirty-five years.  During his career he has worked in the fields of insurance, utilities, telecommunications, and higher education in roles ranging from developer to technical lead to lead architect. He...Read more

Moni Mau, a senior principal QA engineer for trust services business unit, focuses mainly on designing and improving the test automation framework, integrating automation with Jenkins to support continuous integration testing, and executing performance testing. With more than fifteen years of software...Read more

Danny McKeown has more than thirty years of technical and management experience in information technology. With Paychex for twelve years, Danny has spent the last six years as the test automation architect. In this role, he is instrumental in implementing a secure integration of Perfecto Mobile’s solution with...Read more

A principal software developer at SAS Institute, Carl Nagle has focused for the past nineteen years on the development, integration, and evolution of enterprise software test automation tools via the open source SAFSDEV project.  For more than thirty years, Carl has been responsible for the design and...Read more

Kristoffer Nordström is a Test Developer that in his career has worked with technologies such as Telecommunications System, Distributed Compilers, Cloud technology, Smartphone OS development, Embedded systems, and much more. A testing devotee and a member of the Context-Driven test community who with his own company, Kristoffer consults and teaches...Read more

Gitte Ottosen is a managing consultant at Capgemini-Sogeti Denmark, a company that delivers test consultancy.  As a career tester, Gitte has twenty years’ experience in test engineering, test management, and process improvement in both traditional and agile contexts. She has worked in test process improvement, first as a test architect/manager...Read more

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...Read more

A member of IBM’s worldwide technical team, Carlos Pineda specializes in providing clients with service virtualization and test automation solutions. With IBM since 1998, Carlos has been responsible for driving IBM’s business success in several customers across North America and Latin America. He has worked with products and solutions running...Read more

Joel Rieck is a Senior Manager of Quality Assurance at Comcast Cable with over 12 years of experience in testing. Throughout his career he has led and managed transformative testing initiatives, end-to-end program testing solutions, multiple process implementations, innovative solutions, and automation initiatives in an onshore/offshore-resourcing model. Joel is currently...Read more

Anna Russo is an ALM MVP specializing in ALM TFS Software Process consulting and training. Since 2008 Anna has worked with a variety of clients to improve their software quality and processes by properly implementing Microsoft Team Foundation Server, Test Manager, and Visual Studio tools. Anna applies hands on expertise...Read more

A software test architect at Ultimate Software, Dionny Santiago provides expertise and leadership in software testing and contributes in hands-on testing, technical problem solving, training, and internal tool development. Dionny focuses on establishing and disseminating best practices for automated testing of web, mobile, and desktop applications using frameworks such as...Read more

Marjana Shammi is a test lead at IceMobile where she leads a team responsible for the test process in products related to mobile applications for ABN AMRO, Jumbo, food retailers, international cash management, global client data, financial eCommerce, and CRM. With a career in testing and development—and a...Read more

TechWell’s IT director 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...Read more

Gokul Sridharan is a Team Lead in the Digital Presales team at CA Technologies. He is also an entrepreneur by blood and built his own restaurant food chain while he was in India and sold the business before coming to US. With in-depth experience in the DevOps space, Gokul specializes...Read more

Tom Stiehm is a 20 year veteran of the Information Technology industry. He has spent the past 10 years managing, designing and implementing software products and applications using agile software development methods. Prior to Coveros, Tom held a variety of CTO and architect positions at software development companies. Tom is...Read more

With 12 years of experience in all aspects of software testing for both startups and corporate environments, Praveen Thangavelu brings an array of experience to the PTW QE team. During his time at PTW, Praveen has built a vision and robust strategy for QE, created a new service line and...Read more

A senior QA engineer for Lyst, one of London’s fastest-growing startups, Alice Till-Carty landed her career in testing sideways. Having studied film at the university, Alice’s obsession with technology and problem solving gave her a head start in...Read more

Alison Wade is an accomplished executive dedicated to the business of software. For the past fifteen years, she has worked with industry leaders developing programs for software development and testing professionals.  She is the Program Chair for the Mobile Dev + Test and IoT Dev + Test conferences, and she...Read more