ALM Forum Keynote & Plenary Speakers

Aaron Bjork

Aaron Bjork
Principal Group Program Manager
Microsoft

Dan North

Dan North
Industry Legend & Author
Dan North & Associates

Scott Wiltamuth

Scott Wiltamuth
Vice President
Amazon Web Services
Amazon

Wayne Heller

Wayne Heller
Sr. Director Business Architecture
Nordstrom

Sarah Bird

Sarah Bird
CEO
Moz

Mark Schliemann

Mark Schliemann
VP Technical Operations
Moz

Kevin Behr

Kevin Behr
CIO, HedgeServ
Co-Author: The Phoenix Project

All Speakers

Aaron Bjork Aaron Rudger Allan Wagner Andrew Flick Andy Troutman Anthony Borton Arnoud Lems Bernard Golden Cheryl Hammond Chris Brown Chris Jee Chris Kinsman Chris Sells Chris Sterling Dan North Dan Piessens Darren Davis Dave West David Starr Dominica Degrandis Eray Tuzun J. Paul Reed Jens Donig Jim Szubryt John Wetherill John Wiegand Kartik Raghavan Kate Matsudaira Kevin Behr Mark Schliemann Martin Hinshelwood Martin Kuenzle Matt Stine Matt Stratton Melinda-Carol Ballou Mik Kersten Mike McGarr Mitch Lacey Pete Cheslock Peter Provost Rebecca Parsons Richard Seroter Robert Pieper Roy Rapoport Sam Fell Sarah Bird Scott Wiltamuth Skip Angel Steve Riley Steve Speicher Steven Borg Thomas Murphy Wayne Heller

ALM Forum Speaker Biographies

 
Aaron Bjork
Aaron Bjork
Principal Group Program Manager
Microsoft
 
 

Aaron Bjork is a Principal Group Program Manager 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.

Twitter: aaronbjork
Sessions

[Keynote] Scaling Agile and DevOps

Ten reasons your Agile team will fail

ALM Industry Panel

 
Aaron Rudger
Aaron Rudger
Director Product Marketing
Keynote
 
 

Aaron Rudger is senior product marketing manager for Web performance at Keynote, a mobile and website testing and monitoring company. He is responsible for articulating Keynote’s Web performance monitoring strategy and validating it with customers, analysts and partners. Rudger has more than 15 years of experience in the CRM, IT Management and ecommerce industries.

Sessions

Top Tips to Overcome the Language Barrier between the Business and IT Teams

 
Allan Wagner
Allan Wagner
Technical Marketing Manager
IBM Rational
 
 
Allan (Al) Wagner is currently a Testing Evangelist with IBM, driving thought leadership, strategic initiatives, and tangible solutions with a specific focus on quality management, test automation, and service virtualization. In his fifteen years of practical IT field experience, Al has assisted, supported, mentored, and enabled teams with their IT application infrastructure, development, implementation, and operations challenges. A frequent conference speaker on software quality principles and techniques, Al has also coauthored the IBM Service Virtualization For Dummies book and authored numerous papers on quality management and test automation.
Twitter: al_wagner
Sessions

Continuous Testing in Today’s DevOps World

 
Andrew Flick
Andrew Flick
Director Product Management
HP
 
 

Andrew Flick is director of product management for HP-Software Lifecycle Management Suite in the Application Delivery Management Pillar (ADM). Andrew is responsible for the development and delivery of the HP Application Lifecycle Management, Quality Center, and Agile Manager products, includes go-to-market, route-to-market and assessment of strategic partnership opportunities.

Andrew has more than 10 years of industry experience and has held various senior leadership roles w/in product management, product strategy and business development.

Andrew joined HP Software in 2011 as the Sr. Product Manager responsible for the ADM portfolio’s SAP Business. In addition to running the SAP business, Andrew was responsible for taking innovated incubation products to market including HP StormRunner Load.

Prior to joining HP, Andrew held a senior leadership role at Infragistics, the creators of NetAdvantage, a suite of user experience developer tools that drove the UI of many products including HP Quality Center. Andrew holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Bradley University.

Twitter: AndrewMFlick
Sessions

ALM Industry Panel

 
Andy Troutman
Andy Troutman
Development Manager
Amazon
 
 

Andy Troutman is the software development manager for AWS CodeDeploy, and has been working on developer tools at Amazon for over 7 years. Andy loves to help customers solve issues of scale with automation, tooling, and improved development processes. If you come hear him speak, or see him on the conference floor, he'd love to hear about how AWS can better help customers manage their application development processes in the cloud.

Twitter: the_mantrourt
Sessions

Software Delivery Patterns in the Cloud

 
Anthony Borton
Anthony Borton
Lead Consultant
Enhance ALM
 
 

Anthony Borton is the lead ALM consultant for Enhance ALM Pty Ltd, an Australian consulting and training company specializing in Application Lifecycle Management and Microsoft Visual Studio. He delivers training on Microsoft’s ALM products through Seattle-based training provider, QuickLearn Inc and is the lead ALM trainer behind www.alm-training.com

Anthony is a sought after trainer and has delivered technical training and consulting in the United States, Europe and all across the Asia Pacific region. He is a Microsoft MVP (Visual Studio ALM), a Microsoft Certified Trainer and was Australia’s first Professional Scrum Developer Trainer.

Twitter: AnthonyBorton
Sessions

Workshop: Enhance your Application Lifecycle using Visual Studio Online and TFS

 
Arnoud Lems
Arnoud Lems
Agile Delivery Lead
Avanade Netherlands
 
 
Arnoud is an agile delivery lead for Avanade in the Netherlands. Apart from executing agile projects for customers he is also a scrum consultant helping organizations with implementing agile principles at enterprise level. With Avanade Netherlands Arnoud is one of the leading people when it comes to ALM and Agile.
Sessions

Automating deployments with Desired State Configuration

 
Bernard Golden
Bernard Golden
VP, Strategy
ActiveState
 
 

Named by Wired.com as one of the ten most influential persons in cloud computing, Bernard Golden serves as Vice President, Strategy for ActiveState Software. Prior to ActiveState he was Senior Director, Cloud Computing, for Dell Computer, which he joined when it acquired Enstratius, a leading cloud management software company, where he served as Vice President, Enterprise Solutions.

Bernard also serves as the cloud computing advisor for CIO Magazine; his blog has been named to over a dozen “best of cloud computing” lists and is read by tens of thousands of persons each month. He is a highly regarded speaker, and has keynoted cloud conferences around the world.

Bernard is the author or co-author of four books on virtualization and cloud computing, including his most recent book, Amazon Web Services for Dummies, published in Autumn 2013.

Twitter: bemardgolden
Sessions

Jumpstarting Your Microservices Future

 
Cheryl Hammond
Cheryl Hammond
ALM Consultant
Northwest Cadence
 
 
Cheryl Hammond, a.k.a. bsktcase, has more than 14 years’ experience as a software developer in the private and public sectors. She led her team’s successful adoption of Scrum-ban for a mission-critical regulatory compliance project under multi-agency state and federal government oversight, and mentored former COBOL devs into true-believing unit-testing XP evangelists, all of which leads her to believe that anything is possible. She is not sorry for her many biases, including strong preferences for servant-style leadership and team-based, holistic problem-solving and a strong aversion to agile zealotry. Cheryl leads the Northwest Cadence Practices Team, focusing on the ways in which agility, architecture, and test practices improve the lives of developers, strengthen teams, and deliver better software.
Twitter: bsktcase
Sessions

Effectively Measure Your Teams without Subjugating Them

Workshop: Fundamentals of Lean Software Delivery

 
Chris Brown
Chris Brown
Gun for Hire
 
 

Christopher Brown was most recently Vice President of Operations at Fastly, and was previously CTO at OpsCode. Prior to Opscode, Chris was with Microsoft where he was a Director of Engineering for the Edge Computing Network within Global Foundation Services. Prior to Microsoft, Christopher was a Founding Member, Architect, and Lead Developer for Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Christopher has 18 years of software engineering and leadership experience and holds several patents in the areas of Internet routing, VM/runtime hosting, content delivery and cloud computing.

Twitter: skeptomai
Sessions

What is a 'DevOps Transformation?'

 
Chris Jee
Chris Jee
Engineering Manager
Etsy
 
 

Chris is an Engineering Manager at Etsy, an online marketplace for unique goods known for continuous deployment and experimentation. Currently he manages a Growth team at Etsy focused on growing Etsy's user base through engaging early experiences on web and native apps.

While the Growth team is focused on building and enhancing products through experimentation and user analysis, Chris was also heavily involved in the early internationalization of Etsy's website and efforts to expand to new markets. He also spent a few years working at Microsoft on the Exchange team as an engineer.

Twitter: christopherjee
Sessions

More than Code: How Etsy Engineers Drive Product Changes

 
Chris Kinsman
Chris Kinsman
Chief Architect
PushSpring
 
 

Chris Kinsman is Chief Architect at PushSpring. Prior to that he joined Vertafore as VP and Chief Architect in 2006, and then served as VP Development. Prior to Vertafore, Kinsman worked for AMS Services, a business unit of Vertafore, as a consultant to the development team and as a lead architect. During his tenure at Vertafore Kinsman 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, served as vice president of technology for DevX.com.

Twitter: chriskinsman
Sessions

[Plenary] Fireside Chat: Scaling from the Cloud to In-House: The Business and Technical Cases

 
Chris Sells
Chris Sells
Product Manager
Google
 
 

Chris Sells has been a software engineer of one kind or another since he was 14 years old. He's worked at Intel and Microsoft, has started his own companies, has written a dozen books, given countless conference talks and has done everything from QA to developer, consultant to VP, technical support to CTO, chief architect to conference organizer. Currently, Chris is a Product Manager at Google focused on tools for cloud developers.

You can read more about Chris on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/csells), Amazon (http://amazon.com/Chris-Sells/e/B001H6OL1K), Twitter (http://twitter.com/csells) and his own web site (http://sellsbrothers.com).

Twitter: csells
Sessions

Trends in Cross-Platform Mobile Apps

 
Chris Sterling
Chris Sterling
Sr. Lead Product Manager
CenturyLink Cloud
 
 

Chris Sterling is involved with all things Cloud Foundry at CenturyLink Cloud. Chris has an extensive technology, process, and consulting background and brings his experience and deep passion for software development into his daily work and presentations. Chris published the book Managing Software Debt: Building for Inevitable Change with Addison-Wesley in 2010 to provide a framework for teams and organizations to assess and manage debt their software delivery efforts. He has spoken at many conferences and user groups on topics such as continuous delivery, Lean Startup, software architecture, technology management, and Lean and Agile methods. Chris has also successfully supported the efforts of organizational change, Lean, Agile, and Continuous Delivery across multiple verticals with organizations in range of 10 to 800 people.

Twitter: csterwa
Sessions

Reduce Time to Value: Focus on Configuration Management Debt First

 
Dan North
Dan North
Industry Legend & Author
Dan North & Associates
 
 

Dan has been coaching, coding and consulting for over 20 years, with a focus on applying systems thinking and simple technology to solve complex business problems. He uses techniques from Lean operations, Theory of Constraints and Agile software development to help IT organisations anticipate and respond to the challenges of changing business needs.

Dan is the originator of Behaviour-Driven Development, an agile approach to software development that encourages teams to deliver the software that matters by emphasising the interactions between stakeholders. He also proposed Deliberate Discovery, which challenges assumptions around software planning and estimation. He argues that there are no best practices and that everything we do is subject to opportunity cost.

He is a popular keynote and session speaker at international technology conferences, on topics as diverse as software architecture, behavioural psychology, simplicity, uncertainty and learning. His presentation style has been described as Eddie Izzard meets the Architect from The Matrix.

Twitter: tastapod
Sessions

[Keynote] Software, Faster: Accelerating Agile Delivery

Why Agile Doesn't Scale (and What You Can Do about It)

 
Dan Piessens
Dan Piessens
Sr. Agile Consultant
Centare
 
 

Dan Piessens is a Senior Agile Consultant with Centare where he infects his clients with agile principles, DevOps and developer craftsmanship.  Having 13 years of experience in the software industry, Dan has designed and built world class enterprise applications in the transportation, insurance, manufacturing and healthcare industries.  Dan has been a Microsoft Patterns and Practices Champion since 2008 and has been an advisor on numerous projects. As a national speaker Dan has spoken at conferences such as Agile 2014 and That Conference, and has been featured on Podcasts like .NET Rocks. His latest endeavors involve guidance for development teams on 'continuous everything' and promoting best practices for the latest Microsoft web and cloud platforms.

Twitter: dpiessens
Sessions

From Rags to Riches: Transforming a Team with Continuous Delivery

 
Darren Davis
Darren Davis
Director Software Engineering
Providence Health & Services
 
 

Based in Seattle, Washington, Darren K. Davis is currently the Director of Software Engineering in the Strategy and Innovation group of Providence Health and Services, the third-largest not-for-profit health care company in the U.S. Prior to that, he led the web and mobile engineering teams for Starbucks, overseeing a variety of product releases, including the first rollout of their ground-breaking mobile payment app. Before joining Starbucks, Darren worked for Corbis, and was instrumental in the creation of the Kanban development methodology. Before starting his career in software engineering 18 years ago, he was a professional actor, and holds a Master of Fine Arts in Acting.

Sessions

The Secret History of Kanban

 
Dave West
Dave West
Chief Product Officer
Tasktop
 
 

Dave West is the Chief Product Officer at Tasktop. In this capacity, he engages with customers and partners to drive Tasktop's product roadmap and market positioning. As a member of the company's executive management team, he also is instrumental in building Tasktop into a transformative business that is driving major improvements in the software industry. As one of the foremost industry experts on software development and deployment, West has helped advance many modern software development processes, including Agile and Lean methodologies, process improvement, and project and requirements management. He is a frequent keynote at major industry conferences and is a widely published author of articles and research reports, along with his acclaimed book: Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, that helped define new software modeling and application development processes. West's experience includes traditional and object-oriented development for enterprise applications and executive consulting, where he implemented new development processes and tools for IT organizations in Europe and North America. He led the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for IBM/Rational, later adding componentization, SPEMM and support for Agile development. He also managed the development of IBM solutions to support efficiencies in the financial services, product development and government industry sectors.

After IBM/Rational, West returned to consulting and managed Ivar Jacobson Consulting for North America. During the past four years he served as Vice President and Research Director at Forrester Research, where he worked with leading IT organizations and solutions providers to define, drive and advance major Agile-based methodology breakthroughs in the enterprise. West holds a B.A. in Computing and Business from Huddersfield University in the UK and a M.Sc. in Computer Science from Southbank University (UK). Follow @DavidJWest on Twitter

Twitter: DavidJWest
Sessions

ALM Analyst Panel

 
David Starr
David Starr
Scrum Developer & Trainer
Elegant Code
 
 

David Starr is a professional software craftsman committed to improving agility, collaboration, and technical excellence in software development. He is the founder of Elegant Code Solutions, has served in numerous leadership contexts, and was as an early and consistent advocate for agile software development.

He has successfully led product development initiatives and organizational transitions in numerous positions including Chief Software Craftsman at Scrum.org, Sr. Program Manager for Visual Studio at Microsoft, Chief Software Architect, Director of Product Development, Pluralsight Author, independent consultant, and master trainer.

David speaks at various international conferences, is a frequent guest on various podcasts, author of articles throughout the technology industry, Microsoft MVP in Visual Studio ALM.

Twitter: ElegantCoder
Sessions

Workshop: Big Scrum: Scaling Scrum to the Enterprise

 
Dominica Degrandis
Dominica Degrandis
Director of Training and Coaching
LeanKit
 
 

Dominica trains organizations to use the Kanban method to improve workflow and throughput. She’s keen on providing visibility and transparency across teams to bring alignment to the entire organization.

Over the last 18 years, Dominica’s worked with large and small companies in training and coaching, configuration management, build and deployment automation, server and environment maintenance, and project and release management

Dominica combines experience, practice, and theory to help teams level up their capability. Her work focuses on methods for managing and improving workflow and communication between and within departments, especially the workflow through IT and Operations. In addition, as a proponent of the DevOps movement, Dominica works to bridge the gap between Development and Operations teams.

Twitter: dominicad
Sessions

Staying Focused with Conflicting Priorities

 
Eray Tuzun
Eray Tuzun
Sr. Software Architect
Havelsan
 
 

Dr. Eray Tüzün currently works as Senior Software Architect at Havelsan. He has over 15 years of experience designing and building software. He has previously worked as a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft in Microsoft Online Services group, Senior Software Engineer at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Research Engineer at CWRU Genomics Center. He is a MCSD for Application Lifecycle Management and started teaching 'Application Lifecycle Management' in Bilkent University, the first ever undergraduate level class in the subject.

Eray Tüzün received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Computer Science and holds a Phd in Information Systems focusing on software reuse and productivity.

Sessions

Experiences Adopting ALM in a Hybrid Organization

 
J. Paul Reed
J. Paul Reed
Consultant
 
 

J. Paul Reed has over a decade experience in build engineering, release management, software configuration management, and process design, with a focus on discovering business requirements and integrating those needs to get products shipped faster and more reliably.

He draws on experiences in aviation and other mission critical disciplines to implement technical solutions which also address human factors, complex-systems theory, and organizational dynamics, resulting in more stable, versatile, and anti-fragile solutions for your engineering organization.

Having worked with teams of all sizes, from three-person startups to release engineering groups supporting thousands of developer, he tailors solutions to specific operational and organizational requirements and helps scale them as company and products change and grow.

Twitter: SoberBuildEng
Sessions

The Changing Role of Release Engineering in a DevOps World

 
Jens Donig
Jens Donig
Senior Consultant
HOOD
 
 

Jens Donig is Senior Consultant for Systems Engineering with HOOD Group. He specializes in Requirements Engineering and Agile Software Development processes. Since 2009 he has focused on Analysis and Design of ALM workflows. He uses model-based methods to bridge the gap between abstract high-level processes and the actual flow of work.

Jens engages in advancing the state of the art in ALM. He is recognized as experienced consultant, Certified UML Professional (OCUP), frequent speaker, and coauthor of the book Perfekte Softwareentwicklung.

Sessions

Smart ALM

 
Jim Szubryt
Jim Szubryt
Enterprise Workforce
Accenture
 
 
Jim is TFS Product Manager for Accenture’s Enterprise Workforce. He is also an ALM Ranger and a Microsoft ALM MVP, where he was selected as one of the ALM MVPs of the year. His team is globally distributed between Argentina, India and the US and supports more than 2,700 developers across six delivery centers (Argentina, China, India, Philippines, Spain and the US). Jim has spoken to user groups and at code camps in the Midwest for several years.
Twitter: Je2Do
Sessions

How Large Global Enterprises can use ALM Tools for Application Delivery

 
John Wetherill
John Wetherill
Technology Evangelist
ActiveState
 
 
John Wetherill is a Technology Evangelist with ActiveState. Originally from Canada, John has spent much of his career designing and building software at a handful of startups, at Sun Microsystems, NeXT Inc., and more recently in the smart grid and energy space. His biggest passion is for developer tools, or more generally any tool, language, process, or system that improves developer productivity and quality of life. No stranger to technology evangelism, John spent several years in the late 1990's on Sun's Technology Evangelism Team spreading the Java Gospel across the globe and focusing on the prolific number of Java technologies. Now John is returning to his roots, as a technology evangelist working for a Canadian company, albeit remotely from Santa Cruz.
Twitter: bcferrycoder
Sessions

Microservices and PaaS

 
John Wiegand
John Wiegand
Distinguished Engineer
IBM
 
 
John Wiegand has more than 25 years of experience in software development environments. John is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, and is responsible for the open tooling architecture of the Jazz platform. His current focus areas are DevOps, configuration-aware navigation, and connecting + viewing + understanding lifecycle data. In addition, he is the chairman of the OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration) steering committee. Previously, John was the principal architect for the Eclipse Platform infrastructure and was a founding member of the Eclipse Foundation Board, playing a key leadership role in establishing Eclipse as a successful open source project.
Sessions

Continuous Delivery Pipeline for Hybrid Cloud

ALM Industry Panel

 
Kartik Raghavan
Kartik Raghavan
Sr. VP WW Engineering
CollabNet
 
 

Kartik brings deep experience in ideating, defining, developing and launching products through On Premise and SaaS channels. Prior to CollabNet, Kartik was the Vice President of R&D and Product Officer at Serena Software responsible for the Serena Business Manager (SBM), Release Manager and Service Manager products and led global development team s at Oracle.

Sessions

From an ALM Perspective: 3 Prerequisites Before Jumping on the DevOps Bandwagon

 
Kate Matsudaira
Kate Matsudaira
Founder & CEO
popforms
 
 

Kate Matsudaira is an experienced technology leader. She worked in big companies like Microsoft and Amazon, 3 successful startups (Decide acquired by eBay, Moz, and Delve Networks acquired by Limelight), before starting her own company Popforms (https://popforms.com/). Having spent her early career as a software engineer she is deeply technical and has done leading work on distributed systems, cloud computing and mobile. However, she has shown herself as more than just a technology leader by managing entire product teams, research scientists, and building her own profitable business.

She is a published author, keynote speaker, and has been honored with awards like Seattle's top 40 under 40. She sits on the board of the ACM Queue, maintains a personal blog at katemats.com.

Twitter: katemats
Sessions

Where Does Success Come From?

 
Kevin Behr
Kevin Behr
CIO, HedgeServ
Co-Author: The Phoenix Project
 
 

Kevin is Chief Information Office for HedgeServ Dynamic and a visionary IT strategist and author, with over 25 years experience directing companies to success through a combination of scientific research, thought leadership and technology architecture. Kevin is the author / coauthor of seven IT management books including the best-selling novel 'The Phoenix Project' and 'The Visible Ops Handbook'. He has spoken at renowned institutions including Carnegie Mellon University and the National Academies of Science.

Twitter: kevinbehr
Sessions

[Plenary] Systems, Complexity, and Taking on Myths and Legends around Culture

 
Mark Schliemann
Mark Schliemann
VP Technical Operations
Moz
 
 

mark is VP of Technical Operations where he is responsible for migrating Moz from the public cloud to their in-house private cloud. Previously Mark worked for MediaNet and Satori Software.

Sessions

[Plenary] Fireside Chat: Scaling from the Cloud to In-House: The Business and Technical Cases

 
Martin Hinshelwood
Martin Hinshelwood
Consultant
naked ALM Consulting
 
 

Martin Hinshelwood is a consultant for naked ALM Consulting, a technical and management consultancy based in Scotland, and working across Europe, that focuses on helping organisations modernise their development processes and enable a greater degree of business agility. Martin believes that every company deserves high quality software delivered on a regular cadence that meets its customer’s needs.

To enable this, not only is he a Professional Scrum Trainer and EBM Consultant with Scrum.org, he works closely with Microsoft with Visual Studio ALM and has been a Visual Studio ALM MVP since 2008 and a Visual Studio ALM Ranger since 2010.

Martin writes often on his blog and contributes to stackoverflow.

Twitter: MrHinsh
Sessions

Big Scrum: All You Need and It’s Not Enough

Workshop: Big Scrum: Scaling Scrum to the Enterprise

 
Martin Kuenzle
Martin Kuenzle
Program Manager, ALM
evosoft
 
 

Dr. Martin Kuenzle is Program Manager and Principal Consultant for Application Lifecycle Management with evosoft, a subsidiary of the Siemens corporate group. He coaches teams that deliver consulting, solutions, and lifecycle services around Microsoft TFS to various industries. Together with Jens Donig he invented the method of Value-oriented Practices (v-o-p). He is product owner and chief architect of the Siemens Solutions Framework (SSF) for integrated ALM.

Before his current assignment, Martin has worked in the Healthcare sector for 12 years. He held various positions in software engineering and management. His area of expertise includes product line engineering, distributed development, and agile in the large. He is a frequent speaker at software conferences. Martin holds a PhD in mathematics and certifications as Requirements Engineer, Systems Engineer, Configuration Manager, Trainer, and Scrum Master.

Sessions

Smart ALM

 
Matt Stine
Matt Stine
Technical Product Manager
Pivotal
 
 

Matt is a technical product manager at Pivotal. He is a 15 year veteran of the enterprise IT industry, with experience spanning numerous business domains.

Matt is obsessed with the idea that enterprise IT “doesn’t have to suck,” and spends much of his time thinking about lean/agile software development methodologies, DevOps, architectural principles/patterns/practices, and programming paradigms, in an attempt to find the perfect storm of techniques that will allow corporate IT departments to not only function like startup companies, but also create software that delights users while maintaining a high degree of conceptual integrity. His current focus is driving Pivotal’s solutions around supporting microservices architectures with Cloud Foundry and Spring.

Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to OSCON to YOW!, is a five-year member of the No Fluff Just Stuff tour, and serves as Technical Editor of NFJS the Magazine. Matt is also the founder and past president of the Memphis Java User Group.

Twitter: mstine
Sessions

To Microservics and Beyond

Workshop: Architecting for Continuous Delivery with Microservices

 
Matt Stratton
Matt Stratton
Solutions Architect
Chef
 
 

Matt Stratton is a solutions architect at Chef, where he demonstrates how Chef’s automation platform provides speed and flexibility to clients’ infrastructure. He is devoted to concepts like Continuous Delivery and Infrastructure as Code, and his license plate actually says 'DevOps'.

Twitter: mattstratton
Sessions

The Five Love Languages of DevOps

 
Melinda-Carol Ballou
Melinda-Carol Ballou
Program Director, ALM
IDC
 
 

Melinda-Carol Ballou serves as Program Director for IDC's Application Life-Cycle Management research. In this role, Ms. Ballou provides thought leadership, expert opinion, research, and analysis through comprehensive research on application life-cycle management (ALM), with specific focus on software life-cycle process configuration and management, software quality, and IT governance software. Ms. Ballou also offers competitive intelligence and consulting on key aspects of the ALM market to service providers, investment firms, and G2000 end-user companies.

Ms. Ballou is working collaboratively with other teams at IDC to create IDC's project and portfolio research (PPM) in the context of ALM topics. She is also focusing on ways in which ALM must evolve to support services-oriented development and composite applications. For the ITEx service, Ms. Ballou collaborates with colleagues targeting IT governance as it relates to IT portfolio management, encompassing IT PPM, IT asset and financial management to research and support end-user technology decision-making, organizational and process strategies.

Ms. Ballou comes to IDC with over 18 years of extensive experience in IT research and analysis. Prior to joining IDC, Ms Ballou founded Ballou IT Strategies, an independent consulting company that offered analysis of PPM and ALM, as well as supporting collateral to G2000 end-user clients and software providers. Ms. Ballou also served as Senior Program Director at META Group, and during her eleven years with META successfully established and evolved the software development life-cycle management and project and portfolio management research practices. Ms. Ballou has also held various editorial positions, including Senior Writer/Senior Editor for ComputerWorld, and Staff Writer/Senior Editor for Digital Review.

Ms. Ballou holds a Masters Degree in Professional Writing from MIU, and a BA from Williams College in Philosophy and Music.

Twitter: melindaballou
Sessions

ALM Industry Panel

 
Mik Kersten
Mik Kersten
CEO
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
Twitter: mik_kersten
Sessions

ALM Integration Patterns: From Build Automation to Continuous Collaboration

 
Mike McGarr
Mike McGarr
Engineering Manager
Netflix
 
 
Mike McGarr is the Engineering Manager for the Netflix Build Tools team. He is also a co-host of the Ship Show Podcast. He has been developing Java/JVM-based applications for most of his career and been known to dabble in other languages as well. He is passionate about building quality software through automation. Mike can frequently be found talking about Agile, Continuous Delivery, DevOps, or build and test automation. Prior to joining Netflix, Mike was the Director of EngineerOps at Blackboard and the founder of the DC Continuous Delivery meetup.
Twitter: sonofgarr
Sessions

Freedom and Responsibility at Netflix: Centralized Team in a Decentralized World

 
Mitch Lacey
Mitch Lacey
Agile Practitioner & Trainer
Mitch Lacey & Associates
 
 

Mitch has been managing projects for over fourteen 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.

Twitter: mglacey
Sessions

Certification and Professional Standards

 
Pete Cheslock
Pete Cheslock
Ops and Support
Threat Stack
 
 

As the head of Threat Stack's operations and support teams, Pete is focused on delivering the highest level of service, reliability, and customer satisfaction to Threat Stacks growing user base. Previously, he was the head of automation and release engineering at Dyn, managing and deploying to mission critical global DNS infrastructure. Prior to Dyn, Pete was the Director of Technical Operations for Amazon-Backed cloud archiving company Sonian.

Twitter: petecheslock
Sessions

Continuous Security

 
Peter Provost
Peter Provost
Principal Group Program Manager
Microsoft
 
 

Peter Provost is a Principal Group Program Manage for Microsoft Visual Studio where he focuses on analytics, 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.

Twitter: pprovost
Sessions

'I Think' vs 'I Know' – Why You Need Customer Analytics

 
Rebecca Parsons
Rebecca Parsons
CTO
ThoughtWorks
 
 
Dr. Rebecca Parsons is ThoughtWorks' Chief Technology Officer. She has more than 30 years' experience in leading the creation of large-scale distributed and services based applications, and the integration of disparate systems. Before coming to ThoughtWorks she worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida, after completing a Director's Post Doctoral Fellowship at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Her interests includes parallel and distributed computation, programming languages, domain specific languages, evolutionary architecture, genetic algorithms, computational biology and non-linear dynamical systems. Rebecca received a BS in Computer Science and Economics from Bradley University, and both an MS and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University.
Twitter: rebeccaparsons
Sessions

Evolutionary Architecture and Micro-Services

 
Richard Seroter
Richard Seroter
Sr. Product Manager
CenturyLink Cloud
 
 
Richard Seroter is the head of product management for the CenturyLink Cloud, a Microsoft MVP for Integration, Pluralsight trainer, InfoQ.com editor for cloud computing, frequent public speaker, and author of multiple books on application integration strategies. Richard maintains a regularly updated blog on topics of architecture and solution design and can be found on Twitter as @rseroter.
Twitter: rseroter
Sessions

Week in the Life: How one Org’s People, Processes and Technology Deliver Services Effectively

 
Robert Pieper
Robert Pieper
Sr. Consultant
Centare
 
 
He is a Senior Consultant at Centare and a Scrum.org certified Professional Scrum Trainer and Coach and also teaches Kanban in areas of the business that are not creating software and coaches them through successful implementations. Robert has played a pivotal role in developing the Agile Transformation capabilities for Centare in the Milwaukee, WI and Chicago, IL markets.
Sessions

Your Agile Team Needs a Therapist

 
Roy Rapoport
Roy Rapoport
Insight Engineering
Netflix
 
 
Roy Rapoport manages the Insight Engineering group at Netflix, responsible for building Netflix's Operational Insight platforms, including cloud telemetry, alerting, and real-time analytics. He originally joined Netflix as part of its datacenter-based IT/Ops group, and prior to transferring over to Product Engineering, was managing Service Delivery for IT/Ops. He provided input into the forming of the Cloud Operations and Reliability Engineering (CORE) group at Netflix, and continues to play an advisory role to the group and its members. He also built the majority of the python infrastructure libraries to allow developers at Netflix access cloud systems. Roy has been in tech for about 20 years with positions in IT engineering and operations, software development, and software quality engineering, but his passion remains with operations and automation.
Twitter: royrapoport
Sessions

Operational Insight: Concepts and Real-World Applications

 
Sam Fell
Sam Fell
Product Marketing
Electric Cloud
 
 
Sam is a DevOps enthusiast, a “doing things right” enthusiast and an enthusiasm enthusiast. He is currently responsible for Product Marketing at Electric Cloud, a leading provider of enterprise DevOps Automation and Continuous Delivery solutions. Prior to that, Sam spent more than 15 years implementing, marketing and/or selling change management, monitoring and application performance management (APM) solutions at Marimba, Precise, Nimsoft and CA (via acquisition). Sam co-hosts a bi-weekly hangout, “Continuous Discussions (#c9d9),” that provides an open forum to discuss Agile, DevOps and Continuous Delivery.
Twitter: samueldfell
Sessions

Making CD Safe for Ops: Introducing Monitoring Earlier in the Agile Cycle

 
Sarah Bird
Sarah Bird
CEO
Moz
 
 

Sarah Bird serves as the CEO of Moz, the world leader in search, social, and content marketing software. Prior to Moz, Sarah practiced law and travelled the world. Sarah regularly speaks about inbound marketing, business models, entrepreneurship, women in tech, and fostering an inspiring company culture. She also serves on the Board of the Washington Technology Industry Association.

Twitter: sarahbird
Sessions

[Plenary] Fireside Chat: Scaling from the Cloud to In-House: The Business and Technical Cases

 
Scott Wiltamuth
Scott Wiltamuth
Vice President
Amazon Web Services
Amazon
 
 
As Vice President for AWS Dev Productivity and Tools, Scott Wiltamuth is responsible for the AWS Management Console, AWS Console Mobile Apps, AWS SDKs, toolkits for popular IDEs, command-line tools for Linux and Windows, AWS Documentation, and higher level services like CloudTrail, CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk, and OpsWorks. He also manages internal tools – the tools used by Amazon’s own developers to build a wide variety of products, including AWS, Amazon.com, and digital products. Prior to Amazon, Scott spent 18 years at Microsoft, working on platforms and tools for developers. He is one of the designers of the C# language, and holds bachelor's and master's degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Twitter: scottwil
Sessions

[Keynote] Lessons Learned Over a Decade of Micro-service Deployments

 
Skip Angel
Skip Angel
Agile Coach
Rally Software
 
 

Skip Angel is a Agile Coach, Trainer and Consultant for Rally Software based in Seattle, WA. He has 25 years of experience in software development in a variety of roles such as Developer, Project Manager, Consultant and Chief Technology Officer.

Skip has provided solutions in several industries including travel, healthcare, automotive care, retail, social networking and financial. Today he provides thought leadership, training and coaching to new and experienced teams interested in agile practices including Lean/Kanban, Scrum, and Extreme Programming (XP). He also has a unique focus in helping companies achieve organizational agility beyond development teams using a mix of techniques and models like SAFe, Lean Startup, Lean UX, Leadership Agility and others.

As an external coach and trainer, Skip has provided public and private courses to all sizes of product development and IT organizations. He has also been an embedded coach for pilot teams and enterprise transformation efforts across multiple local and distributed teams across US and India.

Skip is a Certified SAFe Agilist, Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), Certified Scrum Coach (CSC), Certified Scrum Professional (CSP), Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Certified Scrum Master (CSM), and Innovation Games Certified Facilitator. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Management Information Systems from Oral Roberts University.

Skip’s community endeavors include being a member of the Agile Alliance, Scrum Alliance, and local agile and software improvement user groups. He has created several blogs, a podcast, and is active using social networking with others in the community. He is also a frequent speaker at process improvement related and project management conferences and events.

Twitter: skipangel
Sessions

Building the Right Thing

 
Steve Riley
Steve Riley
Technical Director
Riverbed Technology
 
 
Steve is Technical Director, CTO Office for Riberbed Technology where he advises customers on on benefits and placement of network and storage optimization technologies. Prior to that he was with Amazon where he managed with customer concerns relating to security, privacy, assurance, and compliance in the cloud. Steve was also a Security Strategist at Microsoft for more than 6 years.
Sessions

Devops and Security: Will they blend?

 
Steve Speicher
Steve Speicher
OpenShift
Red Hat
 
 
Steve Speicher is a member of RedHat's OpenShift which is an open hybrid application platform for the cloud aka Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Steve previously worked at IBM with a focus on integrations and change management. He was the editor for the W3C Linked Data Platform and a number of Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) specifications. He was the lead for the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) Core and Change Management topic areas, which delivers open HTTP REST and Linked Data specifications, as well as implementations. He formerly working in emerging standardization efforts in healthcare and compound documents (W3C).
Twitter: sspeiche
Sessions

Continuous Delivery Pipeline for Hybrid Cloud

 
Steven Borg
Steven Borg
Co-Founder & Strategist
Northwest Cadence
 
 
Steven Borg is the Co-Founder and Principal ALM Consultant of Northwest Cadence. He has been a Microsoft ALM MVP since product inception in 2005, speaks regularly at software development and Visual Studio conferences and has authored Microsoft courseware and white papers on Team Foundation Server, regulatory compliance in software development, Scrum and lean. Steven has helped hundreds of organizations, both large and small, adopt Visual Studio ALM tools to improve their software development process, reduce costs, increase quality and speed delivery dates. His expertise lies in bringing successful lean and agile adoption to companies currently using traditional project management techniques. Steve also holds several other credentials including MCP, MCSD, MCT and Certified Scrum Master (CSM).
Twitter: stevenborg
Sessions

Workshop: Fundamentals of Lean Software Delivery

 
Thomas Murphy
Thomas Murphy
Research Director
Gartner
 
 

Thomas Murphy is a research director with Gartner, where he is part of the Application Strategies and Governance group.

Mr. Murphy has more than 25 years of experience in IT, spending time as a developer, product manager, technical editor and industry analyst. Prior to rejoining Gartner, he worked at Microsoft in the Visual Studio Team System group. Previously, he was an analyst with Meta Group and Gartner. He has served on the board of directors for the OMG and led product strategies at ObjectShare. Early in his career, he served as a technical editor at Software Development and AI Expert magazines and built custom tools for scientific research and embedded systems. His development experience includes embedded systems, Smalltalk, Java, and model-based environments and agile techniques.

Mr. Murphy has degrees in Computer Engineering and Mathematics at the Ohio State University and University of Utah.

Twitter: metamurph
Sessions

ALM Industry Panel

[Plenary] Fireside Chat: Scaling from the Cloud to In-House: The Business and Technical Cases

 
Wayne Heller
Wayne Heller
Sr. Director Business Architecture
Nordstrom
 
 

Wayne Heller is Sr. Director of Nordstrom Business Architecture. The mission of Business Architecture is to ensure exceptional customer experiences and superior company performance by providing a wide range of services that unite business and technology. He and his team help their Nordstrom business partners achieve their short and long-term goals by applying an enterprise end-to-end perspective in the building of capabilities, process, and technology. Wayne is passionate about the potential of combining architecture with storytelling to connect the dots between possibility and reality to make business better. In his spare time, he is a coach and mentor for First Lego League Robotics, an amateur astronomer, and is assembling an Open ROV underwater exploration robot with his four children.

Sessions

[Keynote] From IT to Business Technology: Enterprise Transformation of a Traditional Business

 
 
 
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