ALM Summit Keynote & Plenary Speakers


Brian Harry Technical Fellow Microsoft	Dean Leffingwell Creator Scaled Agile Framework	Jason Zander Corporate VP Microsoft	James Whittaker Development Manager Microsoft	Scott Porad	Dr. Israel Gat Fellow and Director Cutter Consortium	Sam Guckenheimer Group Product Planner Microsoft

ALM Summit Speaker Biographies

Aaron Bjork
Microsoft

Aaron Bjork is a Program Manager Lead working on Team Foundation Server (TFS). He is responsible for the process templates, reporting solutions, and Agile experiences that ship with TFS. Prior to joining Team Foundation Server in 2008, Aaron worked as a software engineer and development lead in Visual Studio. Aaron is passionate about Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions and has a strong desire to see teams improve their software engineering practices. Aaron holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Washington. Aaron is an avid golfer, and loves spending time with his wife and three kids.

Ali Halat
Finning Canada

As Manager of Solutions Delivery at Finning Canada, Ali has responsibility for a cross-functional team of 20+ IT professionals who design and develop custom Web and Business Intelligence solutions. He has successfully led the transformation of Finning's custom application development capability, abandoning traditional project management techniques in favor of a more flexible and responsive product management approach using Agile software development methods.

Ali has over 11 years of experience in the software development field and holds a Bachelor of Applied Information Systems degree from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.

Ahmed Bahaa
CompuPharaohs

Ahmed Bahaa is a Principal Technical Consultant in CompuPharaohs(a Microsoft Gold ALM Partner in Egypt), and an Associate Professor in Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt. Additionally, Dr. Ahmed is a member of the Microsoft Regional Director program since 2010 with a Golden Global Impact Award, and MVP-ALM since 2007. He is holding a Ph.D. degree in Computer, and Information Sciences. With 17 years of experience, Ahmed leveraged a wide spectrum of experiences in Business Intelligence, ALM, and Simulation projects. With a passion of ALM, and Business Intelligence, his engagements with many of the Fortune 100 Corps, Governments, and international Organizations, made him exposed to diversified profile of business challenges that have been solved by his designed IT solutions. As a member into one of the JTC1 ISO advisory committees, he contributes in setting up new IT Standards for the world. Additionally, He is a frequent Microsoft TechEd speaker, and expert. Dr. Ahmed Has Some IEEE published scientific papers, and a simulation research that has been ranked as one of the Top 15 Simulation research efforts along the previous millennium by AMSE (Association for Advancement of Modeling & Simulation Techniques in Enterprises). He is a father of two sons; Bahaa Aldin, and Omar.

Anna Russo
Imaginet

Anna Russo is a Senior ALM Consultant with Imaginet, a consulting services firm specializing in helping companies improve software development process through the use of TFS. She is responsible for helping customers improve their software processes by properly implementing Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server tools in a manner that is compatible for their organization. Since joining Imaginet(formerly Notion Solutions) in 2008, she has worked with a variety of clients and upgraded/installed TFS Server, provided training, created custom software processes, implemented release strategies, automated build scripts, and improved software development practices. Prior to joining Imaginet, Anna specialized in the field of Automation Engineering.

Anutthara Bharadwaj
Microsoft

Anutthara Bharadwaj is Lead Program Manager in the Visual Studio Test Tools group at Microsoft Corporation. Anu has enjoyed building and breaking software in the various roles she has worked in through her 8 year Microsoft stint, shipping multiple versions of Visual Studio ALM

Anu has worked on some cool tools with Exploratory Testing as a central theme, has 3 patents from her research work in this area and has also contributed to James Whittaker’s book on Exploratory Testing. Anu is passionate about software testing and has presented at various test conferences all over the world on a number of topics.

She blogs at blogs.msdn.com/anutthara and tweets at twitter.com/anutthara

Arlo Belshee
Microsoft

Arlo does a little bit of everything, but what he really does is inspire courage. He has gone back and forth several times between management and in-the-trenches development on technically sophisticated products. He challenges every assumption he can find, and helps people learn to change – always and continuously. He has been involved in Agile since 1999. Yet in the middle of that period he worked for 2 years in a rigorous, effective, and pro-people Waterfall development shop. He’s a strong believer in discipline and the agility that comes from it, in punctuated continuity, and in change as the only constant. Don’t do anything he says, but learn why he says it and come up with something better. The best compliment he’s recently received was when a co-worker termed him the Company Jester – because Arlo always has permission to laugh at the King.

Arnoud Lems
Avanade Netherlands

Arnoud Lems works at Avanade as a scrum master and architect currently helping a major insurance company running a scrum project. Back in the day, he started out programming COBOL but quickly stepped up to do programming Visual Basic and is involved in .Net projects for almost ten years now. ALM and TFS belong to Arnoud core compentencies, as well as Biztalk and ASP.Net applications. He is leading the ALM focus area for Avanade in the Netherlands meaning he helps projects get the most out of TFS and the Avanade ALM principles and makes sure knowledge about ALM is evangelized within Avanade.

Benjamin Day

Benjamin Day is a consultant and trainer specializing in software development best practices using Microsoft’s development tools with an emphasis on Team Foundation Server, Scrum, and Windows Azure. He is a Microsoft Visual Studio ALM MVP, a certified Scrum trainer via Scrum.org, and a speaker at conferences such as TechEd, DevTeach, and VSLive. When not developing software, Ben’s been known to go running and kayaking in order to balance out his love of cheese, cured meats, and champagne. He can be contacted via http://www.benday.com

Brad Wilson
Tier3

Brad Wilson spent the first 12 years of his career working mostly for small ISVs as a developer, team lead, architect and CTO. In March 2005, he joined Microsoft on the Patterns & Practices team and worked on EntLib, CAB, and ObjectBuilder. Today he works as a development lead with Tier3, and previous to that he was a senior developer on the ASP.NET team, working on Dynamic Data and MVC. He is the co-creator (with Jim Newkirk) of the TDD framework xUnit.net.

Brian Harry
Microsoft

Brian Harry is a Microsoft Technical Fellow working as the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server - a server-based product designed to dramatically improve the productivity, predictability, and agility of software development teams by ensuring that all team members have easy access to the information they need to make the right decisions at the right time.

Harry worked at start up DaVinci Systems doing electronic mail software from 1988 to 1992. In 1992 Harry left DaVinci Systems with two others to create One Tree Software. One Tree, was a classic garage-type startup company that developed and sold SourceSafe (the same product that is now Microsoft Visual SourceSafe). One Tree Software was acquired by Microsoft in 1994.

After joining Microsoft, Harry worked in what was then the Tools and Databases division. In 1996 he and others began working on the problem of improving the approachability of API for the developer masses. Although this started as investigation of ways to extend COM it eventually grew into what we now know as the .NET Framework. Harry served as the Development manager for the Common Language Runtime and then as the PUM through the rest of the V1 and most of the V1.1 product cycle.

Harry has had a passion for software development tools that dates to his college years in the mid 1980s at North Carolina State University where he did research on compilers, linkers, assemblers, and processor simulation systems.

Chad Albrecht
Centare

Chad is currently a Managing Partner and the Vice President of Centare's Agile Practice. Over the last 20 years of his career, Chad has been an executive, consultant, developer, coach and trainer. Having worked with dynamic organizations around the world in diverse industries, Chad is a strong believer in Agile ALM techniques and the Kaizen corporate culture. Chad is also an avid speaker at user groups, a published author and active member of the software development community. As a Professional Scrum Trainer for Scrum.org, Chad and his practice help organizations make the transition to Agile. You can read more about Chad Albrecht at blog.chadalbrecht.com or centare.com

Christian Hassa
TechTalk

Christian Hassa got in contact with specification-by-example in 2008, when he started to look for improvements of handling regression testing and requirements engineering in the Scrum projects he was working with. He learned about Cucumber for Ruby and started to use it in a .NET project. His team soon decided to build SpecFlow, to provide a better experience for automating Gherkin scenarios on the .NET platform. Today SpecFlow is lively open source project that shares the Gherkin parser with Cucumber.

Christian is working since several years as Product Owner and Coach in Scrum projects. He is managing partner at TechTalk, a .NET services and consulting company focusing on agile delivery. His role is leading the evolvement of methodology and practices at TechTalk and facilitating their application in projects and at clients.

Claude Remillard
InCycle Software

Mr. Remillard is co-founder of InCycle Software - a leading firm providing ALM consulting services for .NET development teams. His primary area of evangelism is the adoption of best practices in software development lifecycle management. Over the last two decades, Mr. Remillard has held different executive positions in the software and technology market. This includes the position of President of Acceleron, a software company that developed and marketed an expense management solution with close to half a million licenses sold worldwide.

Dave West
Tasktop

Dave is Chief Product Office for Tasktop Technologoes. He is a leading expert on software development process, Agile development, Lean thinking, process improvement, project management, and requirements management. His interest in software modeling and application development led to his authoring the book, Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design.

Dave has more than 16 years of experience in technology, working with both software vendors and end user organizations. After college, he worked for a large financial organization in both traditional and object-oriented development and on both the mainframe and client/server platforms. Dave then moved to the software tools business, working as a consultant implementing new development processes and tools for numerous companies in Europe, America, and Canada. Moving from consulting to product development, he was responsible for the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP), adding componentization, SPEMM, and support for Agile development. Taking that experience, he then ran the development of a series of industry solutions in support of financial services, product development, and government sectors. After leaving IBM/Rational, Dave moved into a consulting organization, building and later running Ivar Jacobson Consulting for North America. During that time he worked with clients implementing Agile processes, introducing process improvement, and improving the practices of those customers.

Dave earned a B.A. in computing and business from Huddersfield University in the UK and a M.Sc. in computer science from Southbank University (UK).

David Fletcher
Emerging Health

David Fletcher is Director of Product Development at the healthcare IT firm Emerging Health Montefiore IT, a subsidiary of Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, NY. He and his team develop clinical intelligence software that gives physicians and nurses a tool to research the clinical outcomes of their patients and to evaluate quality improvement initiatives. Development areas include data warehousing, object-oriented software design, statistics, and the .NET framework. Mr. Fletcher also co-moderates the NYC Visual Studio User Group at the Microsoft offices in New York where he coaches and learns from other software engineering teams.

David Starr
Microsoft

David Starr is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft where he helps make tools for agile teams using Visual Studio. He has also been Chief Craftsman for Scrum.org, a five-year Visual Studio ALM MVP, a Pluralsight technical instructor, and agile coach.

David speaks at various international conferences, publishes the occasional article, and blogs at ElegantCode.com.

Dean Leffingwell
Creator, Scaled Agile Framework

Dean Leffingwell, a forty-year software industry veteran and Lean Systems Society Fellow, has spent his career helping software teams achieve their goals. A renowned methodologist, author, coach, entrepreneur and executive, he founded Requisite, Inc., which was acquired by Rational Software. At Rational, (now part of IBM), he served as vice president with responsibilities including the Rational Unified Process. As chief methodologist to Rally Software during its founding, he helped large, distributed, multinational corporations implement Lean and Agile methods at scale. He is the author of Agile Software Requirements, Scaling Software Agility, and Managing Software Requirements, all from Addison-Wesley. His most recent project is the Scaled Agile Framework, a public-facing website which describes a comprehensive system for scaling Lean and Agile practices to the largest software enterprises.

Diana Larsen
FutureWorks Consulting

A founder of FutureWorks Consulting, LLC, Diana Larsen partners with clients in the software industry to create, guide, and fortify resilient workplaces and improve project performance. In addition to consulting with and coaching leaders and teams on adopting Agile work systems, she leads team, project, and whole system processes for collaborative thinking and planning. Diana co-authored Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great! and Liftoff: Launching Agile Teams and Projects. She serves on the boards of directors of the Agile Alliance and the Agile Open Northwest non-profit, and is an associate of the Human Systems Dynamics Institute.

Ed Blankenship
Microsoft

Ed Blankenship is a Program Manager for Visual Studio Test & Lab Management at Microsoft. Prior to coming to Microsoft, Ed was with Imaginet and was a Microsoft MVP of the Year for Visual Studio ALM & TFS.

Eran Sher
Nolio

Eran Sher is responsible for Nolio's product vision, customer success, and development of strategic alliances. Eran is a seasoned executive and has held several senior research and development positions at PortAuthority (acquired by WebSense), Mercury Interactive (acquired by HP) and Conduct Software (acquired by Mercury Interactive). Eran has over 13 years of experience with deep knowledge in areas of enterprise applications and business optimization technologies for both ISVs and corporate IT. Eran holds a B.Sc. in Chemistry and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University.

Erik Zigman

Erik Zigman recently joined Microsoft’s Developer Division as Partner Program Manager in the area of application analytics experiences to bring data insights to developers through the Microsoft developer eco-system.

Prior to joining DevDiv, Erik worked within Microsoft’s Online Services Division for 8 years. As General Manager of the Ad Platform Group’s Audience Intelligence team, he worked on behavioral targeting, analytics and data acquisition platforms where he introduced “bring your own targeting” capability to the Microsoft’s display ad platform. Transitioning to MSN as Development Manager in 2008, he introduced content optimization and personal relevance platforms to drive customer engagement as well as bringing experimentation practices at scale to one of the top 3 web properties on the planet.

Prior to Microsoft, Erik built and delivered complex event processing systems to analyze customer usage patterns within the telecommunications industry. As co-founder and VP of Product Development of BlueSpring Software in 1996, he developed and operated SSAS rating and billing platform to online services & communication providers until joined Quest Communications in 2003. Erik has had a long passion in complex event processing & analytics and is now working to make insight discovery a natural part of the developer experience.

Gregg Boer
Microsoft

Gregg Boer is a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft with 25 years of experience in software. Over his career, Gregg has worked as a Project Manager, Program Manager, Requirements Lead, Software Engineer, Analyst, QA Lead, and Software Designer. Most of his experience is focused on leading small to medium software development teams (10-15 people). Over the years Gregg believes he has made many mistakes, learned many lessons, and worked with many smart people to develop great software. He loves the software industry, and considers himself a lucky man to have been a part of it for so long.

Gregg joined Microsoft in 2005 because he believed in the vision of Team Foundation Server. He truly believes that the right set of collaborative tools could help make the lives of software engineers better. Most recently at Microsoft, Gregg is working on the team developing a set of world-class Agile tools built on top of the TFS Platform.

Israel Gatt
Cutter Consortium

Dr. Israel Gat is a Cutter Consortium Fellow and Director of the Agile Product & Project Management practice, a Fellow of the Lean Systems Society, and a member of the Trident Capital SaaS advisory board. He is recognized as the architect of the agile transformation at BMC Software where, under his leadership, Scrum users increased from zero to 1,000, resulting in nearly three times faster time to market than industry average and 20%-50% improvement in team productivity. Among other accolades for leading this transition, Dr. Gat was presented with an Innovator of the Year Award from Application Development Trends in 2006.

Dr. Gat's executive career spans top technology companies, including IBM, Microsoft, Digital, and EMC. He has led the development of products such as BMC Performance Manager and Microsoft Operations Manager, enabling the two companies to move toward next-generation system management technology. Dr. Gat is also well versed in growing smaller companies and has held advisory and venture capital positions for companies in new, high-growth markets.

Dr. Gat currently splits his time between consulting and writing. He focuses on technical debt, large-scale implementations of lean software methods, and agile business service management ("devops"). His e-book, The Concise Executive Guide to Agile, explains how the three can be tied together to form an effective software governance framework. Dr. Gat holds a PhD in computer science and an MBA. In addition to publishing with Cutter and the IEEE, he posts frequently at The Agile Executive and tweets as @agile_exec. He can be reached at consulting@cutter.com.

James Mondi
Cognizant

Jim has 25 years of management consulting experience in the IT Process, Agility and Quality Transformation space. He is the leader of Cognizant’s Process and Quality Consulting global practice, which is approximately 300 strong and growing rapidly. The team focuses on high end process and quality transformation value propositions for new and existing customers. Jim and his team drive Enterprise Agile methodology adoptions, Agile coaching, and Governance, ensuring that Agile drives the expected outputs and outcomes that the Business expects. Prior to joining Cognizant in late 2008, Jim was a Vice President of Quality at Transunion, Hand he also spent time in leadership roles at Diamond Management Consultants, McKinsey, and Accenture.

He obtained a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from University of Illinois and a M.B.A. from University of Chicago

James Whittaker
Microsoft

James Whittaker is a technology executive with a career that spans academia, start-ups and top tech companies. He is known for being a creative and passionate leader and in technical contributions in testing, security and tools. He’s published dozens of peer reviewed papers, five books and has won best speaker awards at a number of international conferences. During his time at Google he led teams working on Chrome, Google Maps and Google+. He is currently at Microsoft reinventing the web.

Whittaker is the author of How to Break Software, How to Break Software Security (with Hugh Thompson), and How to Break Web Software (with Mike Andrews). While at Microsoft, James transformed many of his testing ideas into tools and techniques for developers and testers, and wrote the book Exploratory Software Testing. His current book was written when he was a test engineering director at Google and is called How Google Tests Software (with Jason Arbon and Jeff Carollo).

Jason Zander
Microsoft

Jason Zander is the corporate vice president of Development for the Windows Azure team at Microsoft, and was previously the executive in charge of the Visual Studio team in the Developer Division at Microsoft where his responsibilities included the Visual Studio family of products.

As one of the original developers of the Common Language Runtime (CLR), Zander's primary technical areas of contribution include file formats, metadata, compilers, debugging and profiling, and integration of the system into key platforms such as operating systems and databases. Before joining the Visual Studio Team, Zander was the general manager for the .NET Framework Team. He has worked on numerous products at Microsoft, including the first several releases of the CLR and .NET Framework, Silverlight, SourceSafe, and ODBC. Before joining Microsoft in 1992, Zander worked at IBM Corp. on distributed SQL and SQL/400 at the Rochester lab.

Zander holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from Minnesota State University. In his spare time, he enjoys playing with his three children and making furniture in his shop.

Jez Humble
ThoughtWorks

Jez Humble has been fascinated by computers and electronics since getting his first ZX Spectrum at age 11. He got into IT in 2000, just in time for the dot-com bust. Since then he has worked as a developer, system administrator, trainer, consultant, manager, and speaker. He has worked with a variety of platforms and technologies, consulting for nonprofits, telecoms, financial services, and online retail companies.

Since 2004 he has worked for ThoughtWorks and ThoughtWorks Studios in Beijing, Bangalore, London, and San Francisco. He holds a BA in Physics and Philosophy from Oxford University and an MMus in Ethnomusicology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is presently living in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.

Jonathan Wanagel
Microsoft

Jonathan Wanagel is a Principal Development Lead at Microsoft and works on www.CodePlex.com (Microsoft’s open source project hosting website). He is a long time Agile practitioner starting with Extreme Programming more than ten years ago. Jonathan enjoys participating in the recruiting process and has conducted over 100 developer interviews, and believes in the art of recruiting and team building as much as the art of developing software.

Jose Luis Soria Teruel
Plain Concepts

Jose Luis Soria works as ALM Team Lead at Plain Concepts, where he helps clients to improve development, delivery, quality and lifecycle for their software. He has trained and coached dozens of teams during the last years, both as an independent trainer and as a Professional Scrum Trainer for Scrum.org (http://courses.scrum.org/about/jose-teruel).

He also regularly engages as a speaker in many events (http://www.slideshare.net/jlsoria/presentations), several times each year, including among others Microsoft TechEd Middle East 2011 (Dubai), Scandinavian Developers Conference 2012 (Gothemburg), XP2011 (Madrid), Agile Portugal 2011 (Porto), Microsoft ALM Sessions and Cloud Day 2012 (Madrid and Barcelona), and all the editions of the Agile Spain Conference and Agile Open Spain that have took place so far. Jose (sporadically) writes at his blog (http://geeks.ms/blogs/jlsoria/) both in Spanish and English, and tweets as @jlsoriat.

Moreover, Jose has been implementing the ideas presented in this session in several projects where the Continuous Delivery model was adopted, and the deployment pipeline was implemented by means of TFS and related tooling."

Kris Lankford
InCycle Software

Kris Lankford is an ALM Practice Director for InCycle Software which is a Microsoft ALM Gold Competency partner. He supports the ALM community by participating in groups such as the ALM Rangers to provide guidance and best practice for Application Lifecycle Management. When Kris is not working, he enjoys spending time with his family and coaching Little League.

Larry Brader
Microsoft

Larry Brader is a Developer Engineer for Testing with the patterns & practices team.

Mark Beeston
Finning Canada

Mark is the Director of Business Processes & Systems at Finning Canada, the Caterpillar equipment dealer in Western Canada. He has overall responsibility for IT, supporting 5000+ users across a diverse operating environment that spans over 50 locations in urban, rural and remote settings. He is passionate about the impact that technology and software bring to the business environment and employs a collaborative style of leadership to align IT resources and capabilities to his organization's strategic priorities.

Mark holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the Alberta School of Business at the University of Alberta, and has over 13 years of experience in the IT industry.

Mark Billings
AAA NCNU

Mark is a Agile project management professional with excellent leadership skills and a proven track record of successful project delivery in the retail, insurance and payments processing industries. He has extensive experience directing implementations of critical business applications involving both packaged and customized point solutions with superb business results, leveraging Agile methodologies and global capabilities. At AAA NCNU he is a Senior Technology leader providing planning and management services for technology program implementations. He leads the Integrated Test program for a $200m+ business transformation initiative.

Martin Woodward
Microsoft

Martin Woodward is a Senior Program Manager for the Team Foundation Server group at Microsoft. He looks after the Team Foundation Server Power Tools and Team Explorer Everywhere where he helps to ensure that Eclipse and cross-platform developers are a thriving part of the TFS eco-system. Before joining Microsoft, Martin worked for Teamprise and was also voted Team System MVP of the year. He has also co-authored the Wrox books Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010 and Professional Team Foundation Server 2010.

When not working or writing, Martin can be found over on his blog at woodwardweb.com or on Twitter @martinwoodward.

Matthew Osborn
Tier3

Matt spent the first few years of his career working in a small startup until he joined Microsoft in June of 2008. He is currently a Software Development Engineer working on NuGet, ASP.NET Web Pages, and ASP.NET MVC. In November of 2012 Matt left Microsoft to join Tier 3 to help build the next great IaaS platform. He has a passion for all web technologies with a special interest in clean and semantic HTML & CSS and has been immersed in the world of .NET since 2005.

Mike Brittain
Etsy

Mike Brittain is the Director of Engineering for infrastructure teams at Etsy in Brooklyn, New York. He manages the low-level platform teams that focus on enabling Continuous Deployment in an engineering team of over 100 people. The focus of these teams is on developer tools, testing automation, web performance, database access, caching, and site resilience.

Mike has been involved in Internet development for over 12 years as a generalist, with interests frequently bouncing between front-end (client) technologies to back-end database architectures and services. He has put his experience to work over the last seven years leading small development teams at a handful of Internet start-ups in New York City.

Muhammad Uppal
BUPA

Muhammad Uppal is a Software Specialist with BUPA and is currently working in infrastruture and focusing on environment provisioing. Muhammad is a seasoned IT specialist and has held several roles in IS organizations including software development, application architecture, integration, Configuration, Release and Environment management.

Mik Kersten
Tasktop

Dr. Mik Kersten is the CEO of Tasktop Technologies, creator and leader of the Eclipse Mylyn open source project and inventor of the task-focused interface. As a research scientist at Xerox PARC, Mik implemented the first aspect-oriented programming tools for AspectJ. He created Mylyn and the task-focused interface during his PhD in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Mik has been an Eclipse committer since 2002, is an elected member of the Eclipse Board of Directors and serves on the Eclipse Architecture and Planning councils. Mik's thought leadership on task-focused collaboration makes him a popular speaker at software conferences, and he was voted a JavaOne Rock Star speaker in 2008 and 2009. Mik enjoys building tools that offload our brains and make it easier to get creative work done. Follow @mik_kersten on Twitter.

Mitch Lacey

Mitch Lacey is an agile practitioner and trainer. Mitch has been managing projects for over twelve years and has numerous plan-driven and agile projects under his belt.

Mitch honed his agile skills at Microsoft Corporation, where he successfully released core enterprise services for Windows Live. Mitch's first agile team at Microsoft was coached by Ward Cunningham (creator of the wiki and co-creator of Extreme Programming), Jim Newkirk (creator of nUnit) and David Anderson (Kanban advocate).

While at Microsoft, he transitioned from Program Manager to Agile Coach, working hand-in-hand with groups throughout their transition to Agile practices. After Microsoft, Mitch was the Agile Practice Manager at Ascentium Corporation where he practiced agility on the projects he ran every day while coaching customers on agile practices and lessons on agile adoption worldwide.

As a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) and a registered Project Management Professional (PMP), Mitch shares his experience in project and client management through Certified ScrumMaster courses, Agile coaching engagements, conference presentations, blogs and white papers.

He is the author of Adventures in Promiscuous Pairing presented and published at the Agile 2006 conference, Transitioning to Agile: Key Lessons Learned in the Field presented and published at the Fall 2007 PMI Global Congress in Atlanta, Georgia and The Impacts of Poor Estimating - and How to Fix It presented and published at the winter 2007 SQE Agile development conference in Orlando, Florida.

Peter Provost

Peter Provost is a Program Manager for Microsoft Visual Studio Ultimate where he focuses on agile development tooling, code-centric modeling and product extensibility. Prior to that, Peter managed the patterns & practices development team at Microsoft where they created Guides, Software Factories and Application Blocks like Enterprise Library and the Composite User Interface Application Block. Before joining Microsoft, he was a consultant in the Rocky Mountain region focusing on Microsoft technologies and agile software development techniques. He has spoken at a number of conferences and user groups and has written articles on test-driven development, ASP.NET, Web services and other topics.

Sam Guckenheimer

Sam Guckenheimer is the Group Product Planner for Visual Studio. Sam is also the author of Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. He has 25 years experience as architect, developer, tester, product manager, project manager and general manager in the software industry in the US and Europe. Currently, Sam is the Group Product Planner for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. In this capacity, he acts as chief customer advocate, responsible for the end-to-end external design of the next releases of these products. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2003, Sam was Director of Product Line Strategy at Rational Software Corporation, now the Rational Division of IBM. He holds five patents on software lifecycle tools. A frequent speaker at industry conferences, Sam is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard University.

Scott Porad

Scott Porad most recently lead Product Development as the CTO at the Cheezburger Network, the company behind I Can Has Cheezburger? Failblog.org, Memebase.com, TheDailyWh.at and KnowYourMeme.com. Since 1995, Scott has been building industry leading web sites including launching drugstore.com, working on ESPN.com at Paul Allen's Starwave Corporation and for Seth Godin at Yoyodyne Entertainment. Scott lives online at scottporad.com and in real life with his family in Seattle.

Sebastian Holst
PreEmptive

Sebastian Holst is chief strategy officer for PreEmptive Solutions. Working closely with global development organizations and Microsoft, he focuses on refining application analytics development patterns and practices.

Sean Laberee
Microsoft

Sean Laberee is the Lead Program Manager working on the SharePoint Tools team in Visual Studio. Having worked on Visual Studio since 2003, he has led various areas including the code editor, the VB, C# & F# IDE experiences, Productivity Power Tools, and MSBuild.

Simon Bennett

Simon has been delivering Software Projects ranging from $300M F-16 mission simulator programmes through to hosted web applications across Australia, Asia, the middle east, USA and Europe. The last 10+ years have been focused on delivering solutions using Agile & Lean Principles. After moving to the UK, Simon worked as project manager in online gaming before taking a position as a CTO in the Finance Sector where he successfully ran on and offshore development using a Agile Methods.

After many years as a practitioner of Agile, Simon turned his hand to consulting, most notably with Conchango where he worked with many blue chip organisations through the EU, US and Asia. Whilst at Conchango, Simon served as the Product Owner for the Scrum for Team System, Team Foundation Server process template and other associated products such as Task board for Team System and Surface Planning Poker.

Simon is currently the Managing Principle for LASTing benefits (UK, Australia)

Steve Riley
Riverbed Technology

Steve Riley is Technical Director in the Office of the CTO at Riverbed Technology. He specializes in enterprise cloud computing architecture and information security. Steve has spoken at hundreds of events around the world, concentrating on performance and security, both on-premise and in cloud. He is co-author of Protect Your Windows Network, contributed a chapter to Auditing Cloud Computing, has published numerous articles, and conducted technical reviews of several data networking and telecommunications books. Before Steve joined Riverbed, he was the cloud security strategist at Amazon Web Services and a security consultant and advisor at Microsoft. Steve is a global moderator of Kubuntu Forums, a support community for Ubuntu's KDE-based distribution. Besides lurking in the Internet's dark alleys and secret passages, he enjoys freely sharing his opinions about the intersection of technology and culture.

Thomas Dasch
Siemens Healthcare

Thomas has been developing large scale software solutions for more than 15 years as developer, tester, architect and integration manager. Since he joint Siemens in 2003 his primary focus is on process improvements to optimize the product quality and the delivery pipeline of the syngo.via product line. He holds three patents in the area of large scale distributed systems and is currently heading the syngo.via build and integration team.

Thomas Rümmler
AIT

Thomas Rümmler works as consultant for AIT and member of AIT TeamSystemPro Team. His professional focus is on Application Lifecylce Management. Thomas helps companies to introduce and customize Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. He shares his experiences as an author of TFS-Blog, in magazines and presentations. AIT TeamSystemPro Team is a group of experts around Team Foundation Server and Application Lifecycle Management. AIT is leading service provider for individual and innovative software solutions based on the Microsoft platform. The company consults and helps its customers implementing their projects with MS .NET technologies and is on the look-out for new team members.

Tracey Trewin
Microsoft

Tracey Trewin is the Director of Program Management for the Application Lifecycle Tools team in Visual Studio. She has been at Microsoft for 17+ years. Tracey has had a chance to work in a variety of areas in the company including bCentral, Exchange, Developer Tools and Xbox. Prior to joining Microsoft she ran her own small business which delivered custom line of business applications for small and medium businesses.

Victor Mushkatin
Microsoft

Victor Mushkatin is Group Program Manager for System Center at Microsoft. He was previously CTO of AVIcode, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2010.

ALM Summit Keynote & Plenary Speakers

ALM Summit Speaker Biographies

All ALM Summit attendees also receive:

ALM Summit Jacket

Agile Software Requirements book

1 Year Subscription to ALM Mag

ALM Summit computer bag

USB drive with ALM Summit presentations and Visual Studio ALM Hands-On-Labs

$120 Voucher to purchase at the Microsoft Company Store at employee prices