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ALM Summit Speaker Biographies
Amit Chopra |
Amit Chopra is a Senior Program Manager with the Visual Studio Test and Lab Group which is responsible for creating the Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional Product and the Lab Management Features. Amit has spent over 10 year in the Developer Division working on variety of IDE Features targeted towards Office Developers, Windows Phone Developers and most recently on features aimed to enhance Developer / Test collaboration in teams who are using Visual Studio Team Foundation Server as the core ALM Platform. Prior to working for Microsoft, Amit has worked for companies such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, Sun Microsystem, CANON and DEC in various capacities in the product and developer evangelism groups.
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Austina De Bonte |
Austina De Bonte is a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, working in Engineering Excellence, a central Microsoft group focused on identifying and sharing best practices company-wide. She has spent the past two years collecting and synthesizing best practices on how to design and deliver products that customers will love. Austina has a Masters degree in Computer Science from MIT, and has held various roles at Microsoft over the past 12 years including Group Program Manager and Principal Product Planner.
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Brian Harry |
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.
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Cameron Skinner |
Cameron Skinner joined Microsoft in 2005 and is currently a product unit manager on the Visual Studio team. He is responsible for overseeing the Visualization and Architecture capabilities found in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. Prior to Microsoft, Mr. Skinner was the CTO and chief architect of application development tools for Embarcadero Technologies. Earlier in his career, he served as CTO for Advanced Software Technologies. In his limited spare time, Mr. Skinner enjoys spending time with his wife and three children, Crossfit, and playing his acoustic bass.
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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.
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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).
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David Green |
David Green is Vice President of Engineering for Tasktop. David is responsible for the delivery of Tasktop's line of products based on its revolutionary task-focused interface technology, and leads associated development consulting and support services for the company.
Prior to joining Tasktop, Green was a founding member of MAKE Technologies where he held the positions of CTO, vice president of technology and principal tools architect. At MAKE, Green pioneered a model-driven approach to legacy modernization on the Eclipse platform. Green is deeply involved in the Eclipse community as the creator and lead of Mylyn WikiText, a framework and tools for integrating wiki formatting into the Eclipse platform. In addition, Green has led the Eclipse Marketplace Client and Mylyn Connector Discovery, two initiatives that are making it dramatically easier for the community to find and install Eclipse extensions. Green is especially well known for his widely read blog Green's Opinion, apps for iPhone and Android, and speaking engagements at conferences such as JavaOne and EclipseCon.
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Eric Willeke |
"I am a pathfinder. I contribute on technical teams by seeking new approaches to accomplish our goals, and then amplify by helping my entire team gain the same capabilities. I explore ways to work faster and more effectively, and then I engage those around me in learning and expanding those methods. I passionately learn and improve myself, and then I joyously share the learning moments of my peers. My work, my love, my passion, and my career are in the people; the technology is just a context in which I work."
"These continual changes in context have exposed me to a number of risk environments, regulatory frameworks, process environments, management structures, technical platforms, and architectural approaches. These differences continually teach me how to see the patterns within our industries."
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Grant Holliday |
Grant is widely recognized as one of the foremost experts of Visual Studio Team System Foundation Server. Prior to joining Microsoft Grant was a consultant at Readify and Team System MVP based in Canberra Australia. In this role Grant was one of the key architects for the first Team System Foundation Server Hosting offering in the World. As a Program Manger on the Team Foundation Server team Grant is currently on the team that supports, optimizes, onboards and promotes TFS for Microsoft's internal customers.
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Jamie Cool |
Jamie Cool is a Group Program Manager in the Team Foundation Server team. He is responsible for the developer experience for TFS. This includes areas such as version control, build, and cross platform support. Jamie has been working on developer technologies for most of his 12 year tenure at Microsoft. Prior to joining the Team Foundation Server project, Jamie worked on areas including Silverlight, ClickOnce & Windows Forms.
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JB Brown |
JB Brown, Visual Studio ALM MVP, is an everyday user, teacher, and advocate of Lean principles, Agile practices, and ALM with Team Foundation Server at Nordstrom, Inc. He's also the author and coordinator of the open source project TeamReview (TeamReview.CodePlex.com), the leading peer TFS Code Review solution, and blogs about TFS and ALM at http://www.controlstatements.com.
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Jim Newkirk |
Jim Newkirk is Director of Development for the Systems Engineering group in Microsoft Services. Prior to that Jim was the development lead for Code Gallery and the development lead for the Microsoft Platform Architecture Guidance team. Jim is also the Conference Chair for Agile 2010, the creator of NUnit, and the co-creator of xUnit.
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John Szurek |
John is an electrical engineer who strayed too close to the gravitational field of computing and got trapped there. The first 15 years of his professional life were spent in medical R&D in the US Army, automating laboratory data acquisition and analysis. The next 10 years John spent on the hospital side of medical computing, working with hospital information systems and managing hospital IT organizations, also in the Army.
At Clear Channel John has served as manager of software innovation, as Enterprise Architect, and currently as director of IT Research and Practice, continuously improving the process and governance of software development. John has a BS in electrical engineering, a MS in biomedical engineering, and a PhD in medical information systems. He and his wife Garnet call San Antonio home.
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John Bach |
Jon Bach is the Manager for Corporate Intellect at Quardev, Inc., an onshore test lab where he manages testing projects ranging from a few days to several months using rapid testing techniques. He is an ardent advocate of building test communities and testing cultures by serving as the speaker chairman for Quardev's public QASIG, speaker chairman for PNSQC 2011, and president of the 2011 Conference of the Association for Software Testing (CAST). He is best known for co-inventing Session-Based Test Management -- a way to manage and measure exploratory testing, but he is also a published author ("Above the Clouds", 1993) and has two popular testing blogs ("Notes, Bugs, and Issues") at quardev.com/blog and jonbox.wordpress.com. He can be found on Twitter as @jbtestpilot.
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Karel Deman |
Mr. Deman is a hands on Senior Director in the Avanade UK Enterprise Applications practice specialised in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) with Microsoft development tools (Visual Studio & Team Foundation Server) with a strong expertise in implementing Agile / Scrum based development processes supporting distributed teams (on shore & off shore) on medium to large-scale .NET based enterprise projects.
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Ken Schwaber |
Ken Schwaber is the co-developer and owner of Scrum with Jeff Sutherland. Ken has been in the software development profession for over thirty years, from bottle washer to cook to waiter. He signed the Agile Manifesto, and founded the Agile Alliance, Scrum Alliance, and recently Scrum.org.
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Mario Cardinalr |
Mario Cardinal is a software architect in Montreal who works with the Urban Turtle team. Since 2004, he hosted the Visual Studio Talk Show, a podcast about software architecture. For the sixth year in a row, he has received from Microsoft the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award. Mario holds Bachelor of Computer Engineering and Master of Technology Management degrees from the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Canada. He also holds the titles of Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (Team Foundation Server), and Microsoft Certified Solution Developer. He shares his free-time with his wife, Nathalie and their four children.
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Mary Czerwinski |
Mary Czerwinski is a Research Area Manager at Microsoft Research, where she manages many diverse areas of human-computer interaction, including social computing, information visualization, CSCW, sensor-based interaction and healthcare. Mary has been an avid participant in the ACM SIGCHI community, sitting on the SIGCHI Executive Committee for the last 10 years, chairing CHI 2008, UIST 2005, Papers Chair for CHI 2000 and UIST 2010, in addition to many other conference volunteer roles. Mary has ~100 publications in HCI and psychology, and holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology. Mary is very involved in supporting academia as well, sitting on multiple university advisory boards and PhD student dissertation committees.
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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.
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Richard Hundhausen |
Richard Hundhausen is the president of Accentient, a company that specializes in Application Lifecycle Management using Visual Studio. He has over 25 years of software development experience and 19 years of training experience. Richard is a Microsoft Regional Director, Visual Studio ALM MVP, and author of Microsoft's "Professional Scrum Developer" course.
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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.
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Stephanie Cuthbertson |
Stephanie Cuthbertson is a Group Manager in Visual Studio Team System. One of the founding members of the Database Edition and a member of the planning team for the VSTS 2008 and Rosario releases, Stephanie today runs the team that delivers dashboards, reports and agile project management tools on top of VSTS.
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Stuart McGill |
Stuart McGill was appointed Chief Technology Officer at Micro Focus in February 2006 and is responsible for shaping future product innovations and bringing world-class software solutions to market. Prior to this, since joining Micro Focus in 1984, he has held a number of positions throughout the company, including worldwide head of Marketing and Product Management; Europe and Middle East sales; Business Development (responsible for acquisitions); and managing Europe and Middle East Year 2000 operations. Before joining Micro Focus, McGill worked for, and was trained by, Shell in various roles. McGill has also created, developed and sold businesses in the software development and marketing services sectors. Mr McGill holds an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Masters degree in Engineering, Economics and Management from Birmingham University.
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Tony Scott |
Tony Scott joined Microsoft Corp. in February 2008 as corporate vice president and chief information officer (CIO). Under Scott's leadership, Microsoft IT is responsible for security, infrastructure, messaging and business applications for all of Microsoft, including support of the product groups, the corporate business groups, and the global sales and marketing organization. Scott champions IT as a value-added business for Microsoft and works with all the company's groups to identify opportunities, structure IT solutions and deliver measurable returns to the business. Scott is also the executive sponsor for Microsoft's Operational Enterprise Risk Management efforts and supports the integration of management principles from the Quality & Business Excellence team, which drive continuous and breakthrough process improvements across the company.
Scott helps ensure that Microsoft is the "first and best customer" of its own products. In addition to maintaining a globally integrated set of enterprise IT platforms built on Microsoft technology, his team deploys prerelease versions of Microsoft products throughout the company. The direction and feedback his team provides to Microsoft developers help them enhance products before their commercial release. Scott's "first and best customer" initiatives help identify and capture new market opportunities while co-developing innovations to software plus services. Scott and his teams also share their IT expertise with customers (via IT Showcase), providing them with firsthand insights on product deployments and the value of Microsoft technologies and services.
Before joining Microsoft, Scott was the senior vice president and chief information officer for The Walt Disney Co., where he led planning, implementation and operations of Disney IT systems and infrastructure across the company. He also held the position of chief technology officer, Information Systems and Services, at General Motors Corp. (GM), where he was responsible for defining the information technology computing and telecommunications strategy, architecture, and standards across all of GM's businesses globally. As vice president of Information Services at Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., Scott led the transformation of its technology infrastructure organization to a shared services model and the development of a corporate infrastructure to support implementation of SAP- and Web-based technologies. Scott's professional experience has also included assignments at Marriott International Inc., Cadren Systems, Sun Microsystems Inc. and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Scott has a bachelor of science in information systems management from the University of San Francisco and also holds a juris doctorate with a concentration in intellectual property and international law from Santa Clara University.
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Vinod Malhotra |
Vinod is a Group Program Manager in the Visual Studio team at Microsoft's India Development Center, Hyderabad. In his current role, Vinod owns planning, execution and roadmap for Visual Studio Lab Management product. Vinod has over 16 years of industry experience in software design, development and testing, including 11 years in Silicon Valley.
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