Verify/ATI Conference Site

Andrew L Pollner is President and CEO of ALP International Corporation, a leading organization in the area of test process improvement and in the use of test automation tools to bring efficiency and effectiveness to the testing process. As an
early adopter of test automation and quality assurance tools Mr. Pollner has built a consulting and training practice serving major financial, insurance, healthcare, telecommunications companies and government agencies to ensure their successful implementation of software testing and surrounding processes.  Mr. Pollner has published articles on software testing and automation and regularly speaks at major national and international testing conferences, including: STAR (Software Testing Analysis & Review), EuroSTAR, USPDI, Mercury Interactive Worldwide, Verify, and the National Capital Area Software Testing Forum which he created and chairs. Mr. Pollner is a Director for the American Software Testing Qualifications Board (ASTQB) standardizing tester certifications in the US and chairs the Expert Level Test Automation Working Party for the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) worldwide tester certification body.

Description forthcoming.

Bob Galen is the director of R&D at iContact and president of RGCG, LLC, a North Carolina-based firm specializing in strategy development, coaching, and training teams making the shift to Scrum and other agile practices. Bob regularly speaks at international conferences and professional groups on topics related to software development, project management, software testing, and team leadership. He is a Certified Scrum Master Practicing (CSP), Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), and an active member of the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance. In 2009, Bob published Scrum Product Ownership–Balancing Value from the Inside Out, which addresses the gap in guidance toward effective agile product management. You can reach Bob at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or rgalen.com.

Description forthcoming.

Dan Bartow is Vice President and CloudTest Evangelist at SOASTA, the leader in performance testing from the cloud. Prior to joining SOASTA, Dan was Senior Manager of Engineering at Intuit, where his team was responsible for the speed and stability of TurboTax Online. Over the past decade, he has been responsible for the performance of websites for leading consumer brands. Dan has set multiple industry precedents including launching the world's largest stateful JBoss cluster and using more than 2000 cloud computing cores to generate load against a live website. Dan is a frequent industry presenter and has spoken at leading testing and cloud computing conferences.

Dharmalingam Ganesan is a Research Scientist at Fraunhofer CESE and is the lead inventor of the FAST approach, and has applied the FAST approach for generating xUnit test cases of several NASA systems, web-based systems, and testing of GUI-based Java systems. Dharma has experiences with architectural analysis and design-for-testability. Dharma has over 10 years of software engineering experience and received a M.Tech degree in Computer Science from India.

Dion Johnson has 15+ years of experience in providing IT services to both government and private industry in a manner that has demonstrated expertise in multiple areas of the software development lifecycle. He has consulted for and to a list of companies that includes Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Hewlett Packard, and Unisys just to name a few. With a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering, he has spent much of his professional career as a consultant in the areas of quality assurance (QA), quality control (QC), software process improvements, requirements analysis and software test automation. As a regular conference speaker and presenter, Dion has delivered award winning and highly acclaimed presentations at many of the most prestigious industry conferences, including the StarEast and StarWest International Conference on Software Testing, Analysis and Review, the Quality Assurance Institute Conference and Better Software Conference. He teaches college and business level classes relative to testing and test automation, and has several published articles in various IT publications, including the Automated Software Testing Magazine for which he is the Managing Editor. Dion is also a lead advisor for the Automated Testing Institute, serves on ATI's Test Automation Body of Knowledge (TABOK), and is the Managing Editor for the TABOK Guidebook.

Description forthcoming.

Dorothy Graham has worked in software testing for over 30 years. Originally from the US, her first job was developing testing tools for Bell Labs in New Jersey. After emigrating to the UK, she worked as a developer for Ferranti Computer Systems in Manchester for 7 years. She developed training courses in software engineering for the National Computing Centre before becoming an independent consultant
specializing in software testing. She founded Grove Consultants in 1988. During her 20 years with them, Grove gained a reputation for the high quality of their training materials and presentations, and established a world-wide client base. In 2008 she left Grove to work again as an independent consultant. She is co-author of three books, was Programme Chair for EuroSTAR 2009, was a founding member of the ISEB Software Testing Board, and is a popular and entertaining speaker at conferences and events world-wide.
 

Edward Bonver is a principal software engineer on the product security team under the Office of the CTO at Symantec Corporation.  In this capacity, Edward is responsible for working with software developers and quality assurance (QA) professionals across Symantec to continuously enhance the company's software security practices through the adoption of methodologies, procedures and tools for secure coding and security testing.  Within Symantec, Edward teaches secure coding and security testing classes for Symantec engineers, and also leads the company's QA Security Task Force, which he founded.  Prior to joining Symantec, Edward held software engineering and QA roles at Digital Equipment Corporation, Nbase and Zuma Networks. Edward is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and a Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional (CSSLP).  He holds a master's degree in computer science from California State University, Northridge, and a bachelor's degree in computer science from Rochester Institute of Technology. Edward is a Ph.D. student at NOVA Southeastern University.

Edwin J Reynolds is the Director of Consulting Services at ALP International Corporation, a leading organization in the area of test process improvement and in the use of test automation tools to bring efficiency and effectiveness to the testing process.  Mr. Reynolds has been involved in Quality Assurance (QA) and Automation for 15 years. As the QA manager at Capital One Finance Corp. he introduced and implemented automation testing throughout all functional areas which included automated Load testing. Mr. Reynolds then worked for Mercury Interactive as a senior technical engineer delivering and implementing automation to 100's of customers throughout the United States. He also was the leader in helping Mercury Interactive develop and deliver best practices and strategies for implementing automation.

Fascinated by the "craft" of software development, Eric Pugh has been heavily involved in the open source world as a developer, committer, and user for the past 5 years. He is an emeritus member of the Apache Software Foundation and lately has been mulling over how we move from the read/write web to the read/write/share web.

In biotech, financial services and defense IT, he has helped European and American companies develop coherent strategies for embracing open source software. As a speaker he has advocated the advantages of Agile practices in software development.

Eric became involved in Solr when he submitted the patch SOLR-284 for Parsing Rich Document types such as PDF and MS Office formats that became the single most popular patch as measured by votes! Eric co-authored "Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server", the first book on Solr. He blogs at http://www.opensourceconnections.com/blog/.

Gabriele Stauss has 13 years' experience in process improvement and quality assurance with Northrop Grumman/TRW/BDM.  She has worked on program and organizational level process improvement implementing processes that meet the intent of the CMMI model. Her experience with CMMI is based on the practical application of the model, and  has also contributed to the preparation of CMMI SCAMPI evidence. In addition, Gabriele Stauss taught business classes at a German business college for 10 years..

Gurinder Negi, has experience leading testing efforts on agile and waterfall projects at State Farm insurance companies in Bloomington IL. Gurinder has a Masters Degree in Computer Science and has also recently procured his Certified Software Test Engineer (CSTE) certificaiton. Gurinder has 8 years of testing experience and is also trained in the Rational Testing tool suite, HP Loadrunner and Quick Test Pro. Gurinder presents at IT Symposiums and Leadership meetings on a regular basis, on varied topics and for different audiences. Gurinder is the Automation Team Lead for ST area in the Systems Department for Statefarm insurance.

Description forthcoming.

Kevin Olbrich has been an Operations Engineer with iContact since 2008.  He has been involved in software as a service (SaaS) development in both early stage and mature startup companies. He has participated in nearly every phase of web-based application development including: initial design of features, implementation, quality assurance, deployment, security, production support, systems administration, maintenance of legacy code, and technical debt reduction.  He has a passion for process automation and automated testing and has also driven the adoption of new technologies and processes.

Linda is the founder of WorkSoft, Inc., developer of next-generation test automation solutions. She is the founder of three software companies including AutoTester, the first PC-based test automation tool. Linda holds degrees in accounting, tax and law and is a frequent industry speaker and award-winning author on software quality. She has been named as one of Fortune Magazine’s People to Watch and one of the Top 40 Under 40 by Dallas Business Journal. She is a regular columnist and contributor to StickyMinds, Automated Software Testing (AST) and Better Software magazines, as well as a past columnist for Computerworld and Datamation, author of the Automated Testing Handbook and co-editor Dare to be Excellent with Alka Jarvis on best practices in the software industry.  Her article “Quality is Everyone’s Business” won a Most Significant Contribution award from the Quality Assurance Institute and was published as part of the Auerbach Systems Development Handbook. You can contact Linda at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Dr. Mikael Lindvall is the director of the Software Architecture and Embedded Systems division at Fraunhofer CESE. Mikael is one of the inventors of the FAST approach and is focusing on testing of Web-based systems. Mikael is also one of the inventors of Fraunhofer's tools and methods for architectural analysis including static and dynamic techniques and has applied them to several NASA systems among others. For example, Mikael and Dharma applied their method for determining development and testing risk to NASA's Space Network consisting of millions lines of code in Java, C/C++, ADA, Fortran etc. Mikael received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Linköping University in Sweden.

Nick Olivo is a test automator and tech writer rolled into one. He works for SmartBear Software, a leading test automation tool vendor, where he helps people decide what tools are right for them on a daily basis. Mr. Olivo has spoken to local development groups in Massachusetts on test automation, provides on-demand webcasts and tutorials for SmartBear, and maintains a test automation blog at http://autonomicon.blogspot.com.

Ole Lensmar is CTO and co-founder of eviware software, recently acquired by SmartBear Software. He also co-founded the company base8, an XML oriented consulting company in 1996 which was acquired by the publicly listed Mogul in 1998. Ole worked as CTO, Product Owner and Lead Evangelist of the company's software portfolio, such as an XML based CMS and a High Performance Search Engine. He created, with Niclas Reimertz, the technology OOW (Object Oriented Web) in early 1998, which presented the notion of having systems interact through the means of sending XML-formed data. He also created soapUI, and with Niclas he started eviware where he as CTO makes sure soapUI continues to be the De Facto TestWare. With Ole's astute eye for technology trends and the test community, eviware leads SOA testing in innovation and user oriented software.

Patrick J. Quilter Jr. graduated from Central Connecticut State University with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science & Mathematics, while also interning for a fortune 100 insurance company.  During this time he focused on producing corporate quality assurance metric reports and gained experience with test automation products.  After graduating and joining the company full time he received the company's Outstanding Achievement Award for an R&D solution that programmatically generated business test cases for automated regression execution.  Patrick has worked as a test consultant providing tools architecture and process guidance for numerous commercial clients and federal government agencies.  After 10 years experience and continued development, he is in the process of patenting a client/server, automation framework that's been configured with many popular automation engines.  He is currently employed as a lead test architect with a major auto insurer while continuing to operate Quilmont LLC, a test process consulting company and software vendor.

Paul Ammann is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information and Software Engineering. His basic research interest might best be described as "Why do things go wrong and what can we do about it?" Current research topics include semantic-based transaction processing, software for critical systems, secure information systems, software testing, and formal methods. He has published more than seventy research papers in refereed journals and conferences.

Ammann earned an AB degree in Computer Science from Dartmouth College, and MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of Virginia.

Peter Varhol is a well-known writer and speaker on software and technology topics, having authored dozens of articles and spoken at a number of industry conferences and webcasts. He has advanced degrees in computer science, applied mathematics, and psychology, and is currently a solutions evangelist at Seapine Software. His past roles include technology journalist, software product manager, software developer, and university professor.

Rick Kuhn is a computer scientist in the Computer Security Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). He has authored more than 70 publications on information security, empirical studies of software failure, and software assurance, currently focusing on combinatorial testing.  He co-developed the role based access control model (RBAC) used throughout industry and led the effort that established RBAC as an ANSI standard. From 1994 to 1995, he served as Program Manager for the Committee on Applications and Technology of the President's Information Infrastructure Task Force and from 1996 to 1999 as manager of the Software Quality Group at NIST.  Before joining NIST in 1984, he worked as a systems analyst with NCR Corporation and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He received an MS in computer science from the University of Maryland College Park,  and a BA and MBA from William & Mary.

Sreedevi Sampath is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She earned her Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of Delaware in 2006 and 2002, respectively, and her B.E. degree from Osmania University in Computer Science and Engineering in 2000. Her research interests are in the areas of software testing, web applications and software maintenance. Her research focuses on regression testing, test generation for web applications and in exploring uses of web application usage data. She has served on the program committees of several conferences including the International Conference on Software Testing Verification and Validation (ICST), International conference on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), and International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE). She is a member of IEEE Computer Society.

Tom Wimsatt is an ISTQB/ASTQB Certified Test Analyst and Test Manager with Software Process Technologies, Inc. in Columbia, Maryland.  He has been in the field of testing for more than 20 years beginning in the Parts Analysis labs with NASA at Goddard in Maryland. The last ten years he has been concentrating on testing software specializing in tools and automated test development.  He can be reached at:  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Viranand Strout has been working in the enterprise software development and software security industry for about 15 years. Viranand is currently the QA Manager for the Product Engineering team at MANDIANT, an information security company that provides enterprise IT security solutions. She is responsible for working with her team to develop the software quality assurance strategy and build a virtual development and test infrastructure for delivering MANDIANT Incident Response (MIR), an enterprise solution that enables security professionals to quickly investigate and remediate IT security issues.  Prior to Mandiant, Viranand has worked at various companies including Symantec, Riptech, and MicroStrategy in quality assurance, product support, and lab environment support.