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Speaker Index

Capgemini Consulting

The mobile testing practice leader for Capgemini, Costa Avradopoulos is a thought leader in software development—from requirements to delivery. With more than twenty-five years of experience, Costa has taken on roles of development, QA, automation, product management, VP, and CTO, and managed systems with 15 million users in telecommunications, financial, wireless, transportation, and retail. He has devoted much of his career to the mobility space, culminating in a patented invention in mobile technology.

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With more than eighteen years of software testing experience, Jon Bach has held technical and managerial positions in companies including Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. 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 and his brother James created Session-Based Test Management, a method to manage and report exploratory testing.

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Chief performance evangelist for SmartBear, Scott Barber is a respected leader in the advancement of software testing practices, an industry activist, and load testing celebrity of sorts. Scott authored several books―Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications, Beautiful Testing, How to Reduce the Cost of Testing, and Web Load Testing for Dummies―and more than 100 articles and blog posts. Founder/president of PerfTestPlus, Scott co-founded the WOPR, served as director of the AST and CMG, and is a founding member of ISST.

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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.

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Imagine Technologies, Inc.

Energy, laughter, and a contagious passion for coding—Mike Benkovich brings it all with him. In a career that has taken him from minion to business owner, from database administrator (DBA) 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.

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Imagine Technologies, Inc.

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.

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

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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. In a recent engagement for one of the world’s largest technology companies, Jennifer served as a strategy executive and in corporate marketing for the C-Suite.

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Gareth Bowles started out as a developer and later graduated to breaking other people's software instead of his own before realizing that his real passion is for shipping product faster, cheaper, and more reliably—while still getting a good night's sleep. Gareth has practiced and managed quality engineering and technical operations at Silicon Valley companies—from six-person startups to major industry players.

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Hans Buwalda has been working with information technology since his high school years. In his thirty year 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. His approaches to testing, like Action Based Testing and Soap Opera Testing, have helped a variety of customers achieve scalable and maintainable solutions for large and complex testing challenges.

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James Christie is a testing consultant with thirty-one years of IT experience. Before moving into testing, James spent six years as an IT auditor, so he has experience on both sides of the fence. With experience in information security management, project management, business analysis, and development, he is particularly interested in links between testing, auditing, governance, and compliance. James spent fourteen years working for a large UK insurance company, then nine years with IBM working with large clients in the UK and Finland.

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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.

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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.

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Boston Scientific Neuromodulation

A senior software engineer with Boston Scientific, Chris Crapo is currently the team lead for the test automation team. Chris has guided the in-house automation system from prototype to a full-featured system that supports unit, integration, and system testing for a number of Class III medical devices. His experience includes developing, testing, and validating software and tools in a regulated environment.

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Mike Duskis got his start as a programmer, hacking video games as a child in the ‘80s. Immediately after high school, Mike sold his first custom-built business software product and launched a play-by-mail gaming company. He went on to gain a broad and deep appreciation of the software development process by playing nearly every conceivable role on projects ranging from children's entertainment to safety-critical medical devices.

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Mark Fewster has more than thirty years of experience in software testing ranging from test management to test techniques and test automation. For the past two decades, Mark has provided consultancy and training in software testing, published papers, and co-authored Software Test Automation and Experiences of Test Automation with Dorothy Graham. A popular speaker at conferences worldwide, Mark has won the Mercury BTO Innovation in Quality Award. He is currently helping ISTQB define the expert level certification for test automation.

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An agile methodologist, practitioner, and coach based in Cary, NC, Bob Galen helps guide companies in their adoption of Scrum and other agile methodologies and practices. Bob is a principal agile evangelist at Velocity Partners, a leading agile nearshore development partner; president of RGCG; and frequent speaker on software development, project management, software testing, and team leadership at conferences and professional groups. He is a Certified Scrum Coach, Certified Scrum Product Owner, and an active member of the Agile and Scrum Alliances.

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Seretta Gamba has more than thirty years’ experience in software development and testing. As test manager at Steria Mummert ISS GmbH, Seretta was charged with improving their test automation process. After studying other strategies, she developed command-driven testing and a supporting framework. Seretta presented an enhancement to the framework that enabled the test automation team to “harvest” test case information by supporting manual testing.

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Redmind
Concurrent Sessions Metrics That Matter

With nearly twenty years of experience in the IT industry, Pablo Garcia has spent time as a project manager, product manager, head of outsourcing, and agile coach. Pablo has first-hand experience as a tester, test manager, head of QA, and test consultant across a broad range of industries including telecoms, financial, gaming, retail, and broadcasting. In 2011, he formed Redmind, a company specializing in consultancy and training in all aspects of testing, management, and agile.

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A principal consultant and head of QA and agile for Redmind, Julie Gardiner provides consultancy and training in all aspects of testing, management, and agile, specializing in risk, agile, test management, and usability. Julie has more than twenty years of experience as developer, DBA, project manager, head of operations management, and head of R&D.

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With more than thirteen years of experience in software testing, Andy Glover is the head of testing at Exco InTouch, a provider of mobile communications solutions in the pharma and medical health sector. At Exco, Andy manages a team of testers responsible for testing software—from windows-based applications to mobile phone applications and SMS messaging—for both internal use and for external clients. Andy likes to be involved in the software testing community and contributes to online forums and the Software Testing Planet.

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Andreas Grabner has more than fifteen years of experience as an architect and developer in Java, .NET, and Web 2.0 with a strong focus on application performance. At Compuware APM (formerly dynaTrace) Andi is a technology strategist, helping companies improve their applications’ performance across the development lifecycle by embracing ideas of continuous delivery and DevOps. He is a frequent speaker on software performance, testing, and architecture topics at technology conferences including Velocity, STAREAST, STARWEST, and JavaOne.

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Grand Software Testing

Jon Hagar is an independent consultant working in software product integrity, testing, verification, and validation. Jon publishes regularly on testing, including the book Software Test Attacks to Break Mobile and Embedded Devices (breakingembeddedsoftware.com).

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AppDynamics

Technology evangelist for AppDynamics, Jim Hirschauer has an extensive background in highly available, business critical, large enterprise IT operations environments. Jim has been interested in application performance testing and monitoring since his days as a systems administrator in a retail bank. His passion for performance analysis led him down a path to design, implement, and manage the cloud computing monitoring architecture for a top-ten investment bank.

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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.

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Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Technology

As manager of quality assurance for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Technology, Les Honniball leads a team of QA engineers responsible for testing the web sites of Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, Disneyland Resort in California, the Disney Cruise Line, and the Walt Disney Paris and Hong Kong theme parks and resorts. A twenty-three year veteran of the testing field with experience working for companies large and small, Les has worked with remote QA teams in India, the Philippines, Argentina, and the US using the agile development process.

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A principal consultant for Cigital, Paco Hope has deep experience in securing software and systems. Paco’s experience covers web applications, online gaming, embedded devices, lotteries, and business-to-business transaction systems. He has worked with small startups and large enterprises in architecture risk analysis, secure code review, penetration testing, and other consulting. Acting president of the London Chapter of (ISC)², Paco serves on (ISC)²'s Application Security Advisory Board, authoring questions for the CISSP and CSSLP certifications.

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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 United States, 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.

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During his twenty-four year career William Hurley has ridden the crest of numerous software development waves. Will represented the U.S. Air Force in the DoD’s joint service architecture for Theater Battle Management, led CMM assessments, and supported the CMMi development, based on his CMM assessment experience. After leaving the Air Force, he led start-ups and helped industry-leading companies identify, apply, and adopt new application lifecycle models.

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An agile tester, trainer, and coach, Griffin Jones provides consulting on context-driven software testing and regulatory compliance to companies in regulated and unregulated industries. Recently, he was the director of quality and regulatory compliance at iCardiac Technologies which provides core lab services for the pharmaceutical industry to evaluate the safety of their potential new drugs.

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A Client Engagement Manager with Aditi Technologies, Deborah Kennedy leads onshore delivery for a large financial services client. With almost twenty years of experience in core development and testing, Deborah spent much of that time working as a process improvement consultant, specializing in revitalizing and streamlining QA departments as well as bringing more awareness to IT’s role in executive messaging.

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Ultimate Software

Tariq King is a software test architect at Ultimate Software, a leading cloud provider of people management solutions. With more than a decade of experience in software testing, Tariq provides technical leadership, strategic direction, and staff training in quality assurance across the organization. Tariq currently supports more than fifteen cross-functional teams working in an agile environment and manages a team that develops internal tools. His testing research appears in several IEEE and ACM publications, and includes collaborations with Microsoft and IBM.

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Hexaware Technologies, Ltd

Anish Krishnan is an experienced strategic consultant involved in defining testing strategies and test solutions for large transformational programs. His consulting strengths include process optimization, engagement planning, and estimation strategies for financial clients. With significant experience understanding client’s “as-is” process maturity, Anish helps create tailor-made processes to align with the client’s maturity goals. He brings in strong testing project lifecycle experience with hands-on end-to-end operations.

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SmartBear Software

Ole Lensmar is chief technology officer at SmartBear Software, a leading provider of quality and performance management solutions used by more than one million software development and operations professionals worldwide. Ole is the cofounder of eviware software, which joined forces with SmartBear in 2011, and the creator of SoapUI, the most used API testing tool in the world. He speaks frequently on the importance of API testing and other related topics, most recently at STARWEST 2013, the API Strategy & Practice Conference, and API Days.

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Claire Lohr has been an active professional in the computer field for thirty years, with the last twenty years emphasizing software process improvement and testing. Claire provides training—design, authoring, and instruction—and consulting services for a wide variety of both government and commercial clients. She is a Lloyd’s Register trained ISO 9000 Lead Auditor and has been trained to perform Software Capability Evaluations for the SW-CMM.

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Deepika Mamnani heads the solutions arm of the Quality Assurance and Testing Services group at Capgemini. She is responsible for devising testing solutions and creating improvement roadmaps for testing organizations across industry verticals. Deepika’s core competency is conducting assessments for testing processes across software development lifecycles. An expert at defining organization and governance structures for testing organizations, she has helped organizations implement centralized testing centers of excellence.

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Results Positive

Wilson Mar has been working with LoadRunner since the 90’s as a Mercury Interactive Certified Instructor, author, and popular blogger. His is currently a Developer Evangelist on Performance Engineering on agile mobile performance testing and other software technologies.

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John McConda is an experienced Software Quality Control/Assurance tester, technician, and manager. Experienced in multiple methods of software testing from rigorous validated system testing, to session-based exploratory testing, test automation, and performance. Teacher and speaker for software testing classes and conferences.

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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.

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Polteq Testing Services B.V.

Test consultant for the Netherlands-based Polteq Test Services B.V. Jeroen Mengerink has performed multiple TPI assessments worldwide. His technical skills allow him to team with developers in testing websites, APIs, and web services. Jeroen performs both functional testing and performance testing. In addition to his work for clients, he is involved with test innovations in agile.

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David Nelson is a principle software engineer with Boston Scientific and has been with them since 1998. David has worked on projects containing medical device software including implantable cardiac pacemakers and defibrillators, implantable stimulators, and external computers to program these devices. He has been involved in both the software development and verification/validation of these devices. David is also on the AAMI faculty and is an instructor for their validation class.

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House of Test
Concurrent Sessions Adventures of a Social Tester

As a result of a mistake, Martin Nilsson started his career in Test working with mobile platforms. Martin says this mistake was the best one he has made in his professional life because testing suited his temperament perfectly. Several years later he joined the Swedish firm House of Test Consulting where he still works today. After a stint in the telecom industry, Martin became a performance test consultant for a shipping company.

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AFour Technologies, Inc.

Subodh Parulekar has more than eighteen years of software engineering experience, with expertise in software testing and quality engineering, solutions architecture, and creation of new services. Subodh is the CEO of AFourTech (afourtech.com), a provider of software testing and QA services with testing labs in Redmond, WA, and Pune, India.

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With more than seventeen years of experience at companies ranging from government agencies and consulting firms to medical-device companies, John Pasko has been agile since introduced to XP and test-first methodologies in 2001. Practicing Scrum for five years, John is currently a software engineer in Speech Recognition Technology at Karl Storz Imaging (KSI). Since joining KSI in 2011, he has worked with the OR1 Team on cutting edge surgical software. John has provided guidance on TDD practices and introduced Mob Programming to the KSI development team.

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Jeff 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 was recognized by Inc. magazine as one of the fastest growing private US companies. Prior to founding Coveros, Jeff was chairman of the board, CEO, and cofounder of Cigital, Inc., a market leader in software security consulting.

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Software Quality Engineering

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 client/server and web-based online applications. A professional instructor for more than twenty-four years, he has presented at numerous industry conferences on development and testing.

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Whether creating test teams for startups or upgrading existing teams at larger corporations, Dennis Pikora creates a unique test and quality culture for each. Dennis focuses on customer expectations and the well-managed delivery of products within their schedules. With the passion acquired in his thirty-one years in the industry, he deftly navigates the pitfalls of development, test, and customer needs.

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Polteq Testing Services BV

Martin Pol has played a significant role in raising the awareness and improving the performance of testing worldwide. Martin is experienced in managing testing

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Alan Richardson has more than twenty years of professional IT experience, working as a programmer and at every level of the testing hierarchy—from tester through head of testing. Author of the books Selenium Simplified and Java For Testers, Alan also has created online training courses to help people learn technical web testing and Selenium WebDriver with Java. He now works as an independent consultant, helping companies improve their use of automation, agile, and exploratory technical testing.

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Principal consultant and a member of the core team at Agile Artisans, Jared Richardson works with other software craftsmen to build excellent custom software. He sold his first software program in 1991 and has been immersed in software ever since. Jared has authored and coauthored 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 agile.

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Vice president of quality assurance for The Neat Company, Shelley Rueger has more than twenty years of experience in software development, primarily in the field of software quality assurance. Shelley has worked at companies both large (HP, Motorola) and small (Bazaarvoice, Moxie Software) across all types of software (desktop to mobile to SaaS, and enterprise to small business to consumer).

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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 providing: install/upgrade/customize TFS server, mentor on software processes, technical training, release strategies, automated build scripts, automated testing, and building virtual lab infrastructures.

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Rob Sabourin, P. Eng., has more than thirty-three 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.

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Through training and coaching, Aaron Sanders helps organizations design collaborative systems. Aaron owes the effectiveness of his work to practice spanning more than two decades in technological and interpersonal disciplines. He believes that his work as a Certified Scrum Trainer introduces all the initial concepts, while the full impact on the learners is usually felt days later. Coaching allows him to sense when a situation requires attention and leads to faster concept integration.

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With more than thirty years of experience working with software development, Jeanne Schmidt has held roles of tester, QA manager, business systems analyst, product manager, and technical trainer. For many years, Jeanne managed the PeopleTools QA team for PeopleSoft. Currently the QA tech lead for the Quality Assurance Practice at Rural Sourcing, Inc., Jeanne leads a team of software testers who help customers deliver quality software and advises customers on test strategies.

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In IBM’s Emerging Technologies organization, Dennis Schultz is a solution architect, tester, and software engineer. As a child, Dennis had an insatiable curiosity of how things worked and a desire to take them apart. The all-too-common outcome was that he could not put them back together again, thus leading to an adult career in testing. Wanting to make amends for these transgressions eventually lead to his current position as a Solution Architect, helping clients assemble products and tools into integrated solutions to meet their challenges.

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An assistant manager in the testing department at Blizzard Entertainment, Nate Shapiro is responsible for learning and organizational development. Nate has been involved in many different functions of the company including CS, QA, training, and recruiting. His career began in the gaming industry in 2007. He holds the Expert Test Manager Full certification from the ISTQB.

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With more than two decades of experience, Ben Simo, aka QualityFrog, is a skilled context-driven software tester who views software testing as a cognitively complex activity that requires critical thinking, effective communication, and rapid self-directed learning. Ben approaches software testing as a search for knowledge―both confirming existing beliefs and seeking out the unknown, gathering information to enable informed decision making.

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Ramandeep Singh has ten years of experience in software testing and test automation for web applications, web services, desktop applications, applications SDKs, localization functional testing, and testing application management technologies. As head of the Test Automation Group at QA InfoTech, Ramandeep has worked on building many automated test solutions and tools to enable effective test automation and functional testing. He has managed large test teams for many agile projects.

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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.

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Clint Sprauve is the senior product marketing manager for HP Software Functional Testing. Previously, Clint was the director of product strategy for the Borland Solutions division of Micro Focus, where he created Borland’s mobile strategy for functional test automation. With more than twenty years of experience in the software development and quality assurance industry, Clint has served as the senior product marketing manager for the Silk Testing Solutions at Borland Software and Segue Software, and as a senior technical sales engineer for both companies.

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As vice president of quality assurance at Comcast, Kannan Subramaniam is responsible for assuring the pristine quality of the organization’s IT applications. Kannan has implemented several process improvements and transformation themes—test data management, assurance on cloud, big data assurance. His experience in software verification and validation services includes establishing a Testing Center of Excellence for a Fortune 500 financial organization.

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Prashant Suri is a senior member of the performance engineering team at Rackspace, the open cloud company. In his role, he helps performance test and benchmark Rackspace's cloud products and applications, writing his own test frameworks to help. In his early years, Prashant developed a number of products on Java/J2EE stack but was fascinated by the vastness of performance engineering. He enjoys improving products’ scaling and robustness. Through the years, he has helped products, developed and used by Fortune 500, scale better.

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A QA director at ChannelAdvisor in Morrisville, NC, Mary Thorn has a broad testing background that spans automation, data warehouses, and web-based systems in a wide variety of technologies and testing techniques. During her more than seventeen years of experience in healthcare, HR, financial, and SaaS-based products, Mary has held manager and contributor level positions in software development organizations. She is a strong leader in agile testing methodologies and has direct experience leading teams through agile adoption and beyond.

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Jim Trentadue has more than fifteen years of experience as a coordinator and 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.

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Stephen Vance (@StephenRVance, www.vance.com) has served in most roles in the software product development process across a wide range of industries and technologies from startups to Fortune 100. As a practitioner, manager, and consultant for the past several years, Stephen has focused on coaching teams in lean and agile approaches to development and testing.

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Gordon Food Service
Concurrent Sessions Growing into Leadership

Pete Walen has been involved in software development for more than twenty-five years. Today, Pete is a Senior Software tester with Gordon Food Service in Grand Rapids, Michigan, working with the company’s quality groups and test teams to help them with testing and coaching them to improve their testing techniques and practices. He describes himself as a Software Anthropologist and Tester, examining how software and people relate and react to each other.

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Steve Weisfeldt is a senior performance engineer at Neotys, a provider of load testing software for web applications. In the load and performance testing world 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 within budget. Prior to Neotys, Steve was president of Engine 1 Consulting, a services firm specializing in all facets of test automation.

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