Steering Committee

Steering Committee

Dr Shanmugam Bharanidharan

Researcher / Senior Lecturer/ Consultant at Advanced Informatics School, Department of Information

Masa Kevin Maeda

Founder and CEO of Valueinnova LLC, USA

Schalk Cronjé

DevOps & Software Testing Coach & Trainer Iota SL, Andorra

Sanjivv Ssharma

PMP

Valerian D’Souza

Senior Manager, ATA and Testing Enthusiast

Aditya Garg

Principal Consultant and Founder Director – QAAgility Technologies

Ashish Mishra

Principal Consultant and Founder Director – QAAgility Technologies

Brijesh Deb

Agile Testing Evangelist Sogeti, Netherlands

Anand Vyas

Principal Consultant MLDS

Prashant Beniwal

Devops CI/CD Coach & Trainer, AI and ML Enthusiast, Director Amdocs

Amit Kumar Tiwari

Entrepreneur | Founder & CEO
Elatform

Pallavi Sharma 

Founder 5 Elements Learning

Dr Shanmugam Bharanidharan, has extensive experience in Penetration Testing, Web Application Security Testing. He hasextensively worked on new tools like avij, Backtrack and focusing on open source tools. He had handled several Vulnerability Analysis (VA) and performed complex penetration testing projects for various clients across the globe.

He holds Doctorate Degree in Computer Science specializing in Network Security from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia which is one of the prestigious universities in Malaysia. He holds industry leading certifications like CEH, CHFI,CTFL, GSEC, and ISO 27001 Lead Auditor. He is having vast experience in mentoring and his research area is focusing more into Ethical hacking and its countermeasures. He has been a consultant to several educational institutions and SMEs assisting them to improve their Information Security infrastructure. He is one of the few Certified Instructor in Ec-council Malaysia enabling him to teach exclusive courses of ethical and web application hacking. He is heading few research projects which are funded by Ministry of Science Technology and Innovation, Government of Malaysia.

Masa Kevin Maeda, Founder and CEO of Valueinnova LLC, an Agile Project Management mentoring, coaching, consulting and training company based in Silicon Valley, and with of Offices in 4 countries. With 25 years of solid experience, he is the creator of Lean Value Innovation; a Senior consultant for the Agile Project Management practice of the Cutter Consortium in Boston Massachusetts; and teacher of Value Innovation at the University of California at Berkeley extension. Masa has provided lean-agile services to customers from Fortune100 to Startups in 12 countries in diverse industries such as Financial, Software development, IT, Airline, Telecommunications, Health, Online services, and Education. An active member of the Lean and Agile communities has given key notes and presentations at numerous conferences worldwide. He has diverse credentials on Lean, Agile, Kanban, Scum, and Innovation Games.

Masa is currently writing a book on Lean Value Innovation and co-authoring a book on Agile PMBOK.

Previously, Masa was founding group member of the Lean Kanban University and one of its first accredited Kanban coaches/trainers (His company, Valueinnova LLC, was a founding Charter Member of LKU). He was an associate of David J. Anderson, the creator of the Kanban Method. Masa was founding team member at four successful startups in Silicon Valley and at three of them created High Caliber Quality Assurance organizations that pioneered techniques, some of them still at the cutting edge these days. He did R&D at Apple Inc. in Cupertino California, USA, and at Justsystems Corp in Tokushima, Japan.

Masa lives in Silicon Valley, California, USA and travels continually around the world to work with customers, provide training, and give keynotes and presentations.

Schalk Cronjé’s, experience in the software industry spans three decades and has spoken and taught on various software delivery techniques in the UK, USA, India and South Africa.

He has been an early adopter of test-driven design and development at all levels of testings and has applied TDD in many programming languages and on various platforms. One specific library he can recall is still in daily usage and is used in scanning millions of emails world-wide, yet the customer defect rate is less than one per year, all which can be attributed to TDD. He has been responsible for many a complex product roll-outs where continuous integration and continuous deployment have been the key. He does not consider TDD to be a useful technique, but the absolute key to competitive and agile delivery in this age of globalization.

He believes that both software engineering and craftsmanship is important for the industry and that both disciplines should be taught to achieve holism in technology delivery. He also understands that there is a strong relationship between the modern software techniques that are used and the signature skills of people and these should be aligned for effective delivery. He holds two engineering degrees and an MBA in technology management.

Sanjivv Ssharma, a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) has over 20+ years of extensive experience of managing IT Teams, Projects Management, Software Testing, Agile Testing, eGovernance and Product Development. Has strong background in delivering projects & developing products in various domains like Banking, Telecom, eGovernance, Stock Exchange, Developmental Sectors, etc.

Proven abilities in managing projects, stakeholder interests, team development, business communication and implementing end-to-end IT solutions in line with core business objectives. Demonstrative in building and mentoring testing delivery with multiple customers.Understanding of the emerging Technologies, their impact and their commercial value.

Contributed in development of Hindi version of “A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge” (PMBOK® Guide) – 4th Edition, 5th Edition and 6th Edition as a member of the PMI India Hindi Translation & Review Team. He translated Scrum Guide and eduScrum Guide in Hindi language. He also translated a very popular book on scrum for kids “Agile Kids – Who’s the boss of me?” in Hindi language. The book is translated in around 6 global languages.

Valerian D’Souza, is a highly talented and accomplished IT Management professional with extensive skills and experience in Shipping and Domain knowledge. Ability to bridge the gap between technical and non-technical personnel. Knowledgeable in all financial and resource management aspects of shipping. In charge of IT training and requirement gathering at Maersk. He went to Singapore to train in QIPM (Quality Improvement Process-Management) from Phil Crosby Associates. He was in the QIT (Quality Improvement Team) as Step sponsor, was also in-charge of implementing the QES (Quality Education System) across the organization. Handled QES training for Parent company employees to be held in India. Excellent presentation and communication skills give him the ability to train and motivate cross-cultural teams in optimizing their performance levels.

He has been a training for major MNCs and public courses since 1992, during this time he has trained on Basic computer principles, Systems Analysis & Design, Business Communication for Diploma in Computer Studies (DCS) and Diploma in Computer Management, Cambridge University level Courses and Systems Analysis & Design for Corporate level Batches (Indo German Chamber of Commerce).

Aditya Garg, Principal Consultant and Founder Director – QAAgility Technologies

Aditya has over 19 years of IT experience and he has been a test architect and principal consultant excelling in designing, strategizing and architecting manual and automation testing solutions. His primary focus has been in the area of establishing and leading testing center of excellence and practices, managing large IT projects, undertaking testing process studies using Six Sigma, CMMi and TMM models, proposing QA solutions, performance engineering and architecture reviews, designing automation frameworks, exploring open source test automation tools/frameworks and Business development.

Aditya has not only managed to establish the entire testing services grounds up but has been a chief innovator in testing processes, test automation and performance testing areas. Aditya has set up offshore testing service centers for large clients from sizes ranging from 10 to 100 people.

Aditya is a Certified Trainer Agile Testing, Qualified Project Management Professional (QPMP), Six Sigma Black Belt, ISTQB certified foundation and advanced level Tester, Sun Certified Java Programmer, Presenter in International conferences on Project Management, Quality and Testing.

Aditya holds B.E. CSE from Jodhpur Univ and MBA Finance from UMASS Lowell, MA, USA.

Ashish Mishra, is an Enterprise Agile Coach and DevOps consultant and has been an early adopter of Agile, practicing XP and Lean development since 1996. He has worked in areas such Agile coaching, DevOps, corporate consulting and public domain training spanning countries like USA, UK, Germany, Denmark, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. He has coached directly to various roles such as Product Owner, Scrum Master, Developers, Testers and build teams. Ashish has also co-created DevOps Maturity model with other agile and DevOps evangelist.

He has seen the Agile evolve from Build automation to CI/CD to DevOps over the years and has designed single-click build process and tools involved in the same. He is the steering committee founder member of the Agile Testing Alliance (ATA) and Indian Testing Board (ITB). He is an active blogger and frequent speaker in technology conferences, he has ability to nurture and grow the breakthrough ideas and mentor new talents; his articles are published on Agile Atlas. He has consulted and coached for companies like Barclays, JPMorgan, Deloitte, HSBC, Wells Fargo, Polaris, Datamatics, MindTree, Ness Technologies, Persistent, iGatePatni and L&T Infotech besides running several public workshops. He is the creator of KAGA (Keep Automation Going Agile) Mobile test automation framework using Appium, Cucumber and Jenkins.

Ashish is published author of the book “A Practitioner’s Guide To Test Automation Using Selenium” by Tata McGraw-Hill.

Brijesh Deb, has nearly 15 years of experience of leading, managing and coaching teams on Software Testing and embracing the Agile mindset. He is a Bachelor of Engineering – Electronics and Communication and an Executive Masters of Business Administration in Operations.

Being a hands on software tester for almost a decade and half now has also helped him stay close to technology and understand the intricacies. He has been involved in testing of applications from lightweight mobile apps to the large scale enterprise level data storage solutions.He has worked on many roles from being a software tester to a test manager to a principal consultant He has been responsible for establishing Test Engineering Practice rather than a Testing Practice ​in his previous roles.​ ​ He has worked on testing a wide range of products spanning several domains such as Education, Insurance, SEO, CRM, Storage and Telecom (Mobile Apps and Mobile Devices). Brijesh has extensive experience in setting up a Test Center of Excellence (TCOE) and defining sub functions, roles and goals of each sub function such as Presales, R&D, L&D, Testing Process, Skill and Knowledge Management, Audits, Software Test Automation, Performance Testing . He has been a pioneer in the evolution of a crowd testing service in one of his previous engagements. He is a crowd tester himself.

Impassioned about testing and being a social networking buff, Brijesh has been involved in testing numerous Mobile Apps . Brijesh is also very passionate about training and coaching. Certified in Agile testing, Brijesh is a huge proponent of Agile and and the Agile mindset.Apart from being a tester, Brijesh is an avid talker, he writes blogs, poetry and aspires to be a stand-up comedian!

Anand Vyas, did M.Tech (Computer Technology) from IIT, Delhi in 2001. His area of interest has been Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Data Science (DS) and presently he is deeply involved in Research & Development of AI & ML enabled software Testing products and services. He have co-authored an International publication Titled, “Devising Interactive Access Techniques for Indian Language Document Images”,and published in International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR-2003, August 4-6 2003, Edinburgh, Scotland. This publication was the outcome of research work in the area of Image Analysis and Computer Vision. Senior Technology Professional with more than 16 years’ experience and have delivered End to End successful deliveries in fast paced technologically advanced projects as a seasoned Technical Leader in areas like Java/J2EE, Responsive Design, Multi-Channel Support, Angular JS with high maturity DevOps practices for large scale agile and SAFe teams, cross located in India and abroad. Hands on Technologically enabled leader with very strong technology learnability index, including areas in Computer Vision, Supervised and Unsupervised Machine Learning, Python, Data Science, Data Visualization, NLP(Natural Language Processing), Data Analysis, BigData, Java/J2EE technologies, Perl, Unix, Sybase.

Anand is passionate about community driven learning specially in the area of technology. He does take lot of community programs like Java boot camps and participates in cutting edge Tech Conferences. He was a speaker and took a workshop/lab in the #ATAGTR2018 on the usage of Machine Learning and Data Science in the area of Testing.

Anand is a Licensed Trainer for CP-MLDS and undertakes public and corporate programs for the same.

Prashant P Beniwal – Testing Director and Trainer with a Masters in Computer Applications from Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology in Patiala, he has a dazzling 20+ years of experience in the IT industry. This stems from working with Amdocs Cyprus (July 2000-Sept 2004) and Amdocs India (October 2004-January 2020) on various posts like SW Matter Expert, SW Team Lead, SW Test Manager and last but not the least, Testing Director from January 2012 till January 2020.

With exemplary interpersonal skills and the attitude of a multi-tasker, he has certified over 100 people in DevOps across India, Cyprus, Spain, and Ireland.

His expertise span from DevOps practitioner, AI, Program Management, Telecom Domain Expert, Quality Assurance and Training and Coaching. With profound knowledge of tools like Git, Jenkins, Maven, Docker, Kubernetes, Python, Java, Junit, Selenium, Robot, Ansible and YAML, he is also a certified trainer in DevOps from Agile Testing Alliance and DevOps Alliance

With other accolades in his dynamic career, he has also delivered training for team members to up-skill their knowledge transition from onshore to offshore. As part of his last assignment with Amdocs he was spearheading as Testing Director for a multimillion dollar deal with Tier-1 Communication Service Provider of USA and was managing Quality Assurance for their Digital and Prepaid Business.

Pallavi Sharma, is a multi-skilled professional with a rich experience spanning two decades. She has contributed in various capacities including as an individual contributor, project manager, scrum master, and coach throughout her career. She is a founder at 5 Elements Learning, and Mosaic Words. She is a published author of 5 books on Selenium and a recognized committer to the Selenium Project. Her involvement extends to being an active participant in international conferences on testing, where she serves as a reviewer, judge, organizer, and speaker. She also holds various certifications in her field. Beyond her professional pursuits, Pallavi has a passion for writing, travel, and conservation. She is dedicated to giving back to society through both her time and resources. She practices the belief #bekind.