Conference Speakers

Davar Ardalan is the founder and storyteller-in-chief of IVOW, a cultural storytelling startup powered by AI. In 2019, Ardalan also served as deputy director of the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program in Washington, DC.  Prior to this, she was a public broadcasting journalist for twenty-five years, mostly at NPR News,...Read more

Dylan Barrell has been focused on accessibility testing for the past nine years, having developed the first browser-based developer tool for accessibility testing and founded the open source technologies that make up the axe family of tools. This includes axe-core, axe-webdriverjs, and react-axe. He has also been involved in many...Read more

Michael Bolton is a consulting software tester and testing teacher who helps people solve testing problems that they didn’t realize they could solve. He is the co-author (with senior author James Bach) of Rapid Software Testing, a methodology and mindset for testing software expertly and credibly in uncertain conditions and...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

Since he got his first computer at age thirteen, Kaushal Dalvi has been interested in systems and software performance. He spent days researching performance characteristics of different motherboards, CPUs, GPUs, RAM, and disks to configure and overclock them in order to squeeze the maximum frames per second out of the...Read more

Philip Daye has more than two decades of experience in software development, testing, and delivery for companies of all sizes. From his earliest days as a software tester to today, Philip has pursued a passion for quality, which has led him to hone his craft by studying and researching the...Read more

Connor studied chemical engineering while in school and did undergraduate research in bioprinting, the intersection of 3D printing and biomedical engineering. While working on his undergrad he was introduced to programming and fell in love. Connor now uses his love of programming and experimentation as a software engineer at Domo,...Read more

Amy Jo Esser is an enthusiastic self-confessed conference and learning addict. She feels like a kid in a candy store at conferences. She has enjoyed learning at conferences from the beginning of her career through today, and she considers herself a learning leader. Amy Jo believes the time is now...Read more

Christine Fisher started her career as a high school history teacher, but a switch to software training got her started on a career path in technology, where she has held various positions in professional services and development over the past fifteen years. Currently managing a team of business analysts and...Read more

Jane Fraser is a software and hardware test engineer and manager with over twenty years of experience in various technologies, including wireless speakers, robotics, mobile games, online games, casual games, social networking games, website QA, e-commerce, release management, desktop publishing, and word processing. She's also an independent certified coach, teacher, and...Read more

Seretta Gamba has forty years’ experience in development and fifteen in test automation. After going through all the usual developer roles, in 2001 she was put in charge of test automation for her current company. She developed a framework that enabled her company to quickly get excellent results. After having...Read more

Josh Gibbs is a senior customer success manager at Contrast Security, where he helps companies build security into their applications. Prior to his current role, Josh led the security testing team at a major cloud hosting provider. He has previously worked in development and security roles within the marketing technology...Read more

Matthew Grasberger is an Associate Consultant at Coveros with a specialty in Test Automation, DevOps Engineering, and Security Automation. Matt has worked with clients to build and develop robust test automation suites that are integrated into DevOps pipelines based on industry leading practices. In addition, Matt has leveraged open source...Read more

Dawn Haynes is CEO, testing coach, and consultant for PerfTestPlus, Inc. A highly regarded trainer of software testers, Dawn blends experience with a real-world view to provide testers with tools and techniques to help them generate new approaches to common and complex software testing problems. Passionate about improving the state...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

Dennis Hurst is a highly respected security expert with expertise in the area of application security and the integration of security into all aspects of the software development lifecycle. His broad experience in security, application development, product management, and IT operations have given him the knowledge and experience to work...Read more

Dr. Jess Ingrassellino is the director of quality engineering for the Nonprofit and Education clouds at Salesforce.org. She is a frequent speaker at international conferences and focuses on community, collaboration, and improvisational practices for enriching professional life. In her spare time, Jess teaches software testing and Python, writes, and plays...Read more

Ken Johnston is a frequent keynote presenter, trainer, blogger, and author on software testing and data science. Currently he is the principal data science manager for the Microsoft 360 Business Intelligence Group (M360 BIG). Since joining Microsoft in 1998 Johnston has shipped many products, including Commerce Server, Office 365, Bing...Read more

Kishore G. Kamath heads the QA function for the Global Services division of Fiserv, a NASDAQ company. He has over thirty years of experience in developing and testing software, including several digital transformations. He has presented papers at multiple testing user conferences in the US and abroad. Kishore has a...Read more

Byron Katz has been in love with computers since his father bought the family a Commodore 64. A degreed architect, he found his way back to software development in 2010, and his career has included roles as a quality assurance lead, a full-stack developer, consultant, and sales engineer. Byron has...Read more

Tariq King is the Head of Quality at Ultimate Software. With over fifteen years' experience in software testing research and practice, Tariq leads a team of directors, architects, and engineers responsible for guidance, strategy, innovation and outreach in software quality and performance engineering. His areas of research interest include software...Read more

Tanya Kravtsov is a Senior Director of QA at Audible, helping to build a new QA org to support innovative product development at scale. Previously, as the head of automation and continuous delivery at ROKITT, senior QA manager at Syncsort, and VP at Morgan Stanley, Tanya focused on quality, automation,...Read more

Janna Loeffler has more than fifteen years of software quality experience. She holds a bachelor's degree in computer engineering and a master's degree in business administration. Working in a variety of software engineering roles, including development, testing, quality assurance, and DevOps, has provided her with a holistic view of software...Read more

Yury Makedonov was trained as a researcher and worked in a research and development institution dealing with composite materials. He has a Ph.D. degree in physics and math, though he is not a rocket scientist anymore; now he is using his skills and knowledge to improve software quality. Yury has...Read more

Aprajita Mathur is a Bioinformatics Software Test Manager with an engineering background in Bioinformatics. She has more than 10 years of software testing experience. She has worked as a manual and automation tester on a wide range of products like instrument software, LIMS, web-applications and integrated solutions which are used...Read more

Mimi Balcom Meng has over twenty years of working experiences as a software engineer, quality engineer, and release engineer. Most of her work is devoted to test automations. Her software testing experiences include testing web applications, middleware and services, databases applications, media applications, software security applications, cloud applications, and server...Read more

Moshe Milman is the cofounder of Applitools, a cloud service for automated visual testing. As part of his role at Applitools, he helps dozens of companies across the industry implement state-of-the-art test automation suites. Moshe is passionate about software testing and frequently gives talks about it in various conferences around...Read more

Kristoffer Nordström is a test developer who has worked with telecommunications systems, distributed compilers, cloud technology, smartphone OS development, embedded systems, and much more. As a testing devotee and a member of the context-driven test community, with his own company Kristoffer consults and teaches the course Python for Testers because...Read more

Tauhida Parveen is a consultant and trainer specializing in software testing and cloud computing. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Florida Institute of Technology. She has over 10 years of experience working in Quality Assurance with organizations such as The WikiMedia Foundation, Millennium Engineering & Integration, Yahoo!,...Read more

Jeff Pierce has more than 20 years of experience in software engineering management, specializing in program, project, and software quality assurance management. Jeff is also experienced in building technical teams that are rapidly able to implement solutions and deliver business value. More recently, Jeff has focused on Agile project management...Read more

Kevin Pyles has been in QA for over ten years and has led local and remote teams responsible for QA across forty-plus concurrent projects. Kevin’s previous teams provided web load testing for over 600,000 connections/sec and I18N and L10N testing for over a hundred languages and countries. Kevin recently fell...Read more

Larissa Rosochansky is the head of Intelligent Automation at Avanade. Prior to that, she was the head of Testing and Automation at IBM Brazil for several years. She has been working with design thinking, project management, quality assurance, and software testing for the last fifteen years. She has worked in...Read more

Heather Samarin, founder of Product Rebels, has seventeen years of experience in delighting customers through the design, development, and management of customer experiences within both B2B and B2C marketing and product management. She’s held senior and C-level roles at start-ups within the social gaming and health care markets, where she...Read more

Lorna Smyth is from Galway on the west coast of Ireland. She is currently a technical sales engineer for SmartBear's test automation tools. She has worked in various IT roles over the past eight years, including technical analyst, data migration test lead, and software licensing specialist. She specializes in test...Read more

Coveros' Executive Vice President of Training Mike Sowers has more than twenty-five years of practical experience as a global leader of internationally distributed test teams across multiple industries. Mike is a senior leader, skilled in working with both large and small organizations to improve their software development, testing, and delivery approaches....Read more

Melissa Tondi has spent most of her career working within software testing teams. She is the founder of Denver Mobile and Quality (DMAQ), past president and board member of Software Quality Association of Denver (SQuAD), and Consultant Manager at Rainforest QA, where she assists companies to continuously improve the pursuit...Read more

Alison Wade is the President of TechWell and 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 has been the Program Chair for the Mobile Dev + Test and IoT...Read more