Chris
Kinsman

Dave
West

Keith
Pleas

Mik
Kersten

Sam
Guckenheimer

Sam Guckenheimer, Chairman

Jim Newkirk, Chairman

Chris Kinsman

Chris Kinsman joined Vertafore, Inc. as vice president and chief architect in 2006. He now serves as VP Development with responsibility for AFW, AMS 360, BenefitPoint, InStar, Prime and Sagitta. Prior to joining Vertafore, Kinsman worked for AMS Services, a business unit of Vertafore, as a consultant to the development team and as a lead architect for AMS 360 and Performance Analyzer. During his tenure at Vertafore Kinsman has moved his teams to a more agile development model and has driven the adoption of a number of ALM practices. Prior to joining AMS Services, Kinsman founded Vergent Software and served as vice president of technology for DevX.com.

Dave West

Dave works with Application Development & Delivery professionals. 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. He also covers the area of product development and its relationship with software systems development.

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).

Jim Newkirk

Jim Newkirk is Director of Development for the Health Solutions group in Microsoft. Prior to that, Jim was Director of Development for the Systems Engineering group in Microsoft Services, the development lead for Code Gallery, and the development lead for the Microsoft patterns & practices team. Jim was also the Conference Chair for Agile 2010, the creator of NUnit, and the co-creator of xUnit.

Keith Pleas

Keith Pleas is a software architect and one of the founders of Guided Design and has worked with the patterns & practices team for several years where he was the architect and subject matter expert for "Design for Operations". Prior to that he worked for more than two years on the team developing the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET. Keith is an internationally known writer and speaker and past Editorial Chair for the VSLive conferences. He was also a founding Contributing Editor to "Visual Studio Magazine", and a Contributing Editor to numerous other publications including "Windows NT Magazine". Keith has developed several Microsoft Professional Certification Exams. Keith was a founding board member of INETA where he also created the INETA Speakers Bureau.

Mik Kersten

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.

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.