Alan Koch

Alan S Koch has more than 40 years’ experience in information technology with a strong primary focus on software development and software quality, including Agile development and DevOps.  In the most recent 20 years, he has assessed and consulted with dozens of organizations, and coached and trained several thousand IT professionals in many different industries.

In addition to BS Mathematics and MS Management Science degrees, Alan has these certifications: 

• Project Management Institute’s PMP and PMI-ACP

• Scrum Alliance’s Certified Scrum master

• International Consortium for Agile’s ICP-TST, ICP-FDO, ICP-IDO

• Axelos’s Certified ITIL Expert

• ISACA’s COBIT 5

• Toast Masters International’s Certified Toast Master

Alan is a prolific speaker, writer and contributor to advancing the IT professions, and the knowledge and capabilities of IT professionals.

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Andrew Griffin

Andy is currently working as a Lead QA Automation Engineer. He graduated from The Ohio State University with a degree in Computer Science, and has subsequently worked at multiple large firms in Central Ohio. His experience includes leading testing teams updating legacy applications, building quality assurance tools and processes for teams from the ground-up, and architecting automation frameworks for a variety of application and technologies. In his spare time, Andy enjoys traveling, golfing, fantasy football, and probably-way-too-competitive kickball leagues.

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Anita Uppalapati 

Anita Uppalapati is the NF Quality Engineering Coach at Nationwide. She has led testing efforts on a range of programs and projects that are Tier 1 and Tier 2 such as Personal Lines Transformation Release 2.0, New Company, Goal State Underwriting, SmartRide, etc. She enjoys working with Application teams, listening and understanding their current testing challenges, identifying complex workflows that are manual intense by experimenting, designing and building innovative automation solutions that include risk-based testing and reusability that enable application teams to efficiently test E2E to help save time and money and deliver faster software releases.

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Annie Bhaumik

Annie is a Senior Performance Test Engineer at OCLC. She is passionate about performance testing and engineering. Prior to OCLC she worked in Cognizant Technology Solutions.She has led several performance testing engagements in Banking, Retail and Insurance companies to successful completion. Annie has expertise with performance testing, engineering, monitoring  and tuning Web, API, Cloud, Hadoop applications using an array of performance testing and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools in the Performance work space.

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Brian Brady

Brian is a test automation specialist a mabl. A technology enthusiast - interested in open source, DevOps, and microservices. Brian loves history, guitar, and exploring the city of Boston in his free time.

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David Laulusa

David has worked at a variety of companies, both large enterprises and small startups. As a contractor and as an FTE. Mostly in Development but several years in QA. A few years ago when he started working at SAP, his boss handed him The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim and Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and said, ‘Read these and figure out this DevOps thing.

David has been a member of the DevOpsDays Columbus organizing committee since it’s inception. He’s also Co-Organizer of the DevOps Columbus Meetup.

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Deepika Achary

Deepika Achary is a Test Engineer at OCLC. She joined OCLC in 2018 where she currently automates tests for big data technologies. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Biju Patnaik University, India. She has a prior work experience as a test automation developer with Tata Consultancy Services. Some of her strengths are building and maintaining test automation frameworks. She has a knack towards problem solving and possesses great analytical skills. Deepika is trained in an Indian classical dance form called Odissi which she practices in her spare time and loves to paint.

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Dennis Colburn

Dennis is a test automation consultant who has been working at Sogeti since March 2017.  He spent most of his career as a software developer but was exposed to automated testing in 2011 while working at Nationwide Insurance.  He was intrigued by the new method of testing and has been striving to mature test automation in the data warehouse/ETL domains at every company he was worked with since.

Dennis grew up in Columbus and graduated with a B.S. in Mathematics from Ohio State.  He has 4 kids, a granddaughter, and a yellow lab named Jax.  In his spare time, Dennis likes to read, listen to music,  and play board games and table top rpgs with family and friends.  He is also learning to play the guitar and quickly learning that patience is a virtue in this endeavor.

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Eran Kinsbruner

Eran Kinsbruner is the chief evangelist at Perfecto (a Perforce company) and the author of ‘The Digital Quality Handbook’ and ‘Continuous Testing for DevOps Professionals’, as well as a monthly columnist at the Enterprisers Project. He is a software engineering professional with nearly twenty years of experience at companies such as Matrix, Sun Microsystems, General Electric, Texas Instruments and NeuStar. He holds various industry certifications from ISTQB, CMMI, and others. Eran is a recognized mobile and web testing influencer and thought leader, as well as an experienced speaker in the major software engineering conferences. He is also a patent-holding inventor for a test exclusion automated mechanism for mobile J2ME testing, public speaker, researcher, and blogger. He can be found all over social media, including on Facebook, Twitter (@ek121268), LinkedIn, and his professional continuous testing blog – http://continuoustesting.blog.

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Ford Arnett

Ford Arnett is an experienced full stack developer with several years in the automation space. He has created an automation department from the ground up, from building an automation lab to architecting several frameworks. Having worked with over a dozen clients impacting millions of users, all with varying QA automation needs, Ford employs a myriad of tools and tricks to help his team tackle all kinds of challenges. He also leads a monthly QA automation group in Dallas that has over 500 people.

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Jeff Van Fleet

THE GEEK: Jeff Van Fleet, President, Lighthouse Technologies

After spending over 20 years managing, developing, and deploying complex software/hardware systems for both commercial and Department of Defense (DoD) applications, Jeff founded  Lighthouse in 2000 with the aim of establishing a company whose customer service was only eclipsed by the quality of its work.  Armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of motivational leadership tactics and a wealth of expertise in software quality assurance (QA) processes and technical leadership, he’s a both a hands-on company leader and the primary architect of Lighthouse’s celebrated workplace culture. Jeff is a proud graduate of Penn State University where he played the trumpet in the marching Blue Band.

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Jenna Davis

Jenna is currently an Automation Engineer for Encova Insurance located in Columbus, Ohio. She has over 3 years of experience in Quality Assurance including manual testing, production support testing, and primarily, performance testing. She currently holds the ISTQB Certified Testing Foundation Level certification. Jenna is also passionate about Diversity & Inclusion and currently is the Chair of Mosaic, the LGBTQ+ Associate Resource Group at Encova. Prior to her technology career, she worked in health care and recreation. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sport Management, Master’s degree in Recreation Studies, and an Associate’s degree in Computer Science. Jenna is proud of her diverse background and believes it aides in her success today as a Quality Assurance professional.

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Jennifer Bonine

Jennifer Bonine is a well-known speaker, teacher, and trainer at both national and international conferences. She has keynoted numerous Testing, Agile, and Development conferences. Jennifer’s belief is that we should do what we are passionate about and believes in living your passion. To this end, Jennifer co-founded and is the CEO of Pink Lion AI: a breakout AI company that brings AI to the world’s app teams and delivers AI integration with a human engagement model while educating teams on solving challenges with an AI-first strategy. Jennifer is the first female AI testing tech CEO and is currently collaborating in the entertainment, gaming, media and professional sports industries with Test.AI. As Test.AI’s partner PinkLion is solving testing challenges using AI that have been unsolvable with more traditional automation testing. Jennifer has held executive-level positions leading development and quality engineering teams for Fortune 100 companies in several Industries. In a recent engagement Jennifer served as a strategy executive and in corporate marketing for the C-suite.

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Jerren Every

Jerren is an Automation Developer supporting customer facing web applications. His scope of work includes: databases, Jenkins, services, desktop applications and web applications. Jerren additionally enjoys teaching others about coding and test-automation. Previously Jerren worked for Sogeti as a QA Analyst.

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Jess Lancaster

Jess Lancaster is the QA Practice Manager at TechSmith, the makers of Snagit, Camtasia, and other visual communication software applications. He has over 18 years of testing and test leadership experience with government, financial, insurance, and commercial software organizations. Jess regularly speaks on software development and testing at meetups and conferences. He has served as adjunct faculty for software testing at Lansing Community College and is the co-founder of Lansing Area Software Testers. 

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Joel Montvelisky

Joel Montvelisky is a Co-Founder and Chief Solution Architect at PractiTest. He has been in testing and QA since 1997, working as a tester, QA Manager and Director, and a Consultant for companies in Israel, the US and the EU. Joel is also a blogger with the QA Intelligence Blog, and is constantly imparting webinars on a number of testing and Quality Related topics.  Joel is also the founder and Chair of the OnlineTestConf, and he is also the co-founder of the State of Testing survey and report.  His latest project is the Testing 1on1 podcast with Rob Lambert. Joel is also a conference speaker, presenting in various conferences and forums world wide, among them the Star Conferences, STPCon, JaSST, TestLeadership Conf, CAST, QA&Test, and more.

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Joseph Beale

Joseph Beale is a Lead Consultant for Tricentis who travels all over the country helping clients implement test automation and training them on the Tosca automation tool. Joe lives in Columbus and is one of the organizers for the QA or the Highway conference. Joe has over 20 years of experience in systems and has been focused on Test Automation since 2012. 

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Josh Grant

I'm Josh Grant, a test automation specialist with nearly a decade of work experience in test automation. I've worked with desktop UI automation, unit testing, integration testing and Selenium-based testing with several languages and tools. Currently I am a Solution Architect for Sauce Labs (www.saucelabs.com), helping customers solve their pressing test automation problems and helping teams succeed with test automation. I currently live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.2. 

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Joshua Russell

Josh is a test automation developer  with experience automating web, desktop, mainframe, mobile, and more.

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Kelsey Shannahan

Kelsey Shannahan is a senior developer at CoverMyMeds.  Her testing background has given her a different perspective in how to approach building software, specifically how testing should make our lives easier, not harder.  She develops primarily in Ruby with some Elixir because Elixir is really cool.

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Kenny Gilles

Originally from Sweden, Kenny Gilles has spent the last six years in Stockholm and Columbus working as a QA/QC and Front-End Engineer. Working on a multitude of customer-facing projects at Klarna, an online payments company, he has designed and implemented a handful of automation libraries and pipelines. Throughout the years he has seen and heard about the obstacles people with disabilities face every day while browsing the web, and from that Kenny has grown more and more passionate about the topic and about spreading the good word of accessibility.

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Mark Adams

THE COACH: Mark Adams, ESPN National College Basketball Analyst and VP of Client Success, Lighthouse Technologies

Former coach Mark Adams has been a national men’s college basketball analyst for ESPN since 1999. Adams is a real coach who develops strategies for IT teams struggling with leadership, communication, and teamwork. Previously, Adams enjoyed a 17-year college coaching career with a proven track record of rebuilding struggling programs. Between his three college head coaching jobs, those teams had a combined winning percentage of 34 percent (28-54) in the season before Adams took over. In his final season at each of the three universities, he led them to a combined 59-32 record, a 65 percent winning percentage, with two championships and Coach of the Year honors in 1989. He also held assistant coaching positions at Washington State University and Idaho State University, where he earned his master’s degree in athletic administration.

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Max Saperstone

Max Saperstone has been working as a Software and Test Engineer for over a decade, with a focus on Test Automation within the CI/CD process. He specializes in open source tools, including the Selenium Tool Suite, JMeter, AutoIT, Cucumber, and Chef. Max is the Director of Test and Automation at Coveros, where he works as a test strategist and architect; he works with organizations to determine how best to test the application across the organization to ensure high quality and low risk releases. He currently heads up the development of Selenified, an open sourced testing framework to allow testing of multiple interfaces, custom reporting, and minimal test upkeep.

In addition to working heavily under the testing umbrella, Max is also an experienced Agile developer, and he is well versed in Agile processes and practices. He is an ICAgile Certified Professional (ICP). Max has spoken at multiple conferences including STARCanada, STAREast, Mobile Dev and Test, and AgileDC, and is currently an instructor for several courses.

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Mohamed Maktoum Yoosuf

An ambitious, innovative, and hardworking IT professional with a proven track-record of guiding teams across some of the largest & leading IT service providers across multiple industries within the US, Canadian, European, and Scandinavian markets.

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Patrick Poulin

Patrick started his tech career on mobile, and soon was managing the retail vertical for a company building the first mobile websites for over 75 major brands such as Tesco, Target, Macys, and MAC Cosmetics. After a (thankfully) short stint in adtech, he became the API Evangelist for Getty Images. This is where he first recognized the lack of good API tools. That experience is what led to the creation of API Fortress with his cofounder.

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Raj Subrameyer

Raj is the Principal Consultant at ChaiLatte Consulting. He helps developer tools and/or services companies build awareness, increase organic website traffic, and generate leads through content creation and social influencer marketing. He also provides test consulting and training to make people and processes more effective.He actively contributes thought leadership and enrichment to the software community through conference talks, contributed articles, blogs and youtube videos, where he shares development,testing, leadership and productivity experiences gained through various development projects. You can read Raj’s expertise on his personal website www.rajsubra.com. He can be reached at , or follow him on twitter - @epsilon11.

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Richard Douglass

Richard is a User Experience Consultant. For over 15 years he has helped create engaging experiences for companies such as IBM, Razorfish, and PwC. He has worked on a range of projects: Intranet, Extranet, .com, Mobile, and Enterprise and Development software. In addition, Richard has experience with a range of methodologies including: co-creation and strategy workshops, usability testing, interaction design, and persona development. In addition he has led workshop at conferences in China, New Zealand, and the United States.

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Robert Fornal

Husband, father, and ... programmer (senior developer). My focus is on front-end development: JavaScript, CSS, SVG, AngularJS and Angular, React, Ionic

"Learning from my mistakes over the decades, I feel that I have become a solid programmer." -- Me

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Ryan Quellhorst

Ryan Quellhorst has been leading test teams and testing software for the last 5+ years. He is a BA/QA at Deep Lens where he's working on solutions that identify cancer patients for clinical trials. Outside of the office, he loves spending time with his wife and kids, traveling, running, golfing, and rocking out in the car to 90s music. 

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Sangit Patel

Sangit Patel is an engineer by trade, but after some time in the adtech industry he saw an opportunity to shift towards a more client facing role. In doing so, he realized his passion for bridging the technical side with the business side. That has brought him where he is today - as Sales Engineer with API Fortress, Sangit works with clients and business partners to improve their API testing and explore all that API Fortress can provide.

Sangit is an avid traveler and seeks to check off only 2 more continents from his travel list. He's also had a lifelong passion for music and enjoys playing clarinet and viola in his free time. 

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Thomas Haver

Thomas is presently serving as Manager for Validation & Delivery. He leads a team of testers, ops engineers, and production support analysts in the adoption of DevOps practices. Previously, he led the enterprise automation support of 73 applications at Huntington National Bank that encompassed testing, metrics & reporting, and data management. Thomas has a background in Physics & Biophysics, with over a decade spent in research science studying fluorescence spectroscopy and microscopy before joining IT.

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