125 Awesome Testers You Should Keep Your Eye on Always

125 Awesome Testers You Should Keep Your Eye on Always

By Anne-Marie Charrett 

WiT working party (Maaret Pyhäjärvi, Lisa Crispin, Nicola Sedgwick, Lisi Hocke, Ale Moreira, Ashley Hunsberger, Alex Schladebeck, Claire Moss and others)

Testing - providing feedback on quality of the systems we are producing - has never been so relevant. The growing importance and criticality of software in our lives means testing is too important to be left only to testers but also one too important for not having specialists. It’s a field as wide as programming and an essential part of development. This list is a celebration of awesome testers that lead the way into the future of our industry and you should definitely keep your eye on!

As always, lists are not comprehensive, but we put our best effort into making this list of the awesome people we look up to & learn from and expect that you can find nuggets of wisdom following their work. Welcome to 125 Awesome Testers You Should Keep Your Eye on Always!

* Note: As lists always do, this represents the limited view of its authors. There are more amazing testers that either we forgot at time of making this list or have not yet had the pleasure of realizing they exist. The hard prioritization for only 125 has been made with the criteria of really brilliant, impactful people that first came to mind deserve to be on this list of awesome testers.

 

1. Abby (Abigail) Bangser (UK)
@a_bang

Abby works as consultant with Thoughtworks and recently relocated from the USA to the UK. She’s an insightful technical expert who shares her lessons at conferences. Her most recent work is teaching AWS and we look forward to seeing all the things she is sharing. Abby is one of the most thoughtful and analytical individuals, and her sharp mind has made an impact watching her easily tackle some of the most challenging tester games at conferences.

 

2. Alessandra (Ale) Moreira (USA)
@testchick

Alessandra is an experienced consultant and test manager and is known as an international community power figure. She’s started the active Women in Testing Skype/Slack community and contributes through various non-profit efforts in testing. She has a hands-on approach to software testing and is passionate about diversity in tech & sharing her knowledge. Ale speaks at conferences and blogs at https://roadlesstested.com/.  

 

3. Alexandra Casapu (Romania)
@coveredincloth

Alexandra works with various companies though Altom. When Alexandra did her first international talk in EuroSTAR some years back, she got immediately voted as the session to redo so that anyone who missed it, should see it. She is a thoughtful tester who teaches commercial BBST courses alongside with Cem Kaner. You can find her writings regularly in the Altom Blog.

 

4. Alex (Alexandra) Schladebeck (Germany)
@alex_schl

Alex is the head of Software Quality and Test Consulting at BREDEX GmbH and a product owner for the open source test tool Jubula. She is an international speaker with various topics sharing her project experiences and learning from other practitioners. Recently she has been contributing heavily on making conferences awesome as a e.g. member of the EuroSTAR conference program committee.

 

5. Alina Ionescu (Romania)
@al_innutza

Alina is a facilitator of one of the cities for Tabara de Testare, Test automation awesomeness lady with very hands-on attitude and a member of a winning team for a major European hackathon in 2017. She can do everything and recently she’s been into Docker and continuous integration.

 

6. Amber Race (USA)
@ambertests

Amber is a senior software developer in test and one of the people who do amazing technical workshops and talks on testing topics. While she has done it all, she recently has been specializing in test automation and performance testing for high volume back-end services.

 

7. Amy Phillips (UK)
@ItJustBroke

Amy is doing great work at Songkick, and shares on what she has learned regularly. She is also one of the facilitators of Weekend Testing Europe, where people get a chance to practice testing together in sessions facilitated over Skype.  

 

8. Angie Jones (USA)
@techgirl1908

Angie is a super automation engineer working at Twitter. Angie specializes in automation architecture and tooling such as Selenium and Cucumber. As an international speaker, she provides an abundance of information on test automation strategies and implementation. Angie is also a master inventor and educates others on how to patent their own ideas (she has 24 of her own). She blogs at http://angiejones.tech.

 

9. Anna Baik (UK)
@TesterAB

Anna is a test manager at Brightpearl. In addition to being awesome at work and finding new testers for their needs, she has invested her time into communities. She is the organizer of Bristol Software Testing Club meetups, and co-founded the European Chapter of Weekend Testers.

 

10 .Anna Royzman (USA)
@QA_nna

Anna is the founder of Quality Leadership Institute and runs her conferences in New York. She’s a long time tester and test manager, with a keen interest into leadership. She puts her energy into facilitating New York area testers to connect co-running a meetup. She volunteering with various international non-profit efforts to improve testing craft. You can often found her in conferences, both as a speaker and participant, and you shouldn’t miss out on picking her brain if you ever get a chance.

 

11. Anne-Marie Charrett (Australia)
@charrett

Anne-Marie is an independent testing coach from Australia, and travels the world to speak in testing conferences. Her blog http://mavericktester.com offers thought-provoking articles founded on her vast experience of testing. She’s considered a thought-leader in the context-driven testing community. Anne-Marie is also a passionate mentor, who has helped many testers grow their own careers and go forth to be awesome themselves.

 

12. Apryl Gordy (USA)

Apryl is an aspiring speaker who is up and coming with her ideas around manual testing and leadership in testing. She is a through Context Driven Development (CDD) Tester with a strong hand in ethics. Apryl also encourages a healthy dose of pushback.

 

13. Arifa Batool (Australia)
@arifaBatool

Arifa works as Atlassian QA, Quality Assistance. She’s originally from Pakistan. She has participated in the Software Testing World Cup Asia continental rounds. Check out her blog! https://testing-chronicles.blogspot.fi

 

14. Ash Coleman (USA)
@AshColeman30

Ash is engineering manager and a consultant with years of experience. When she speaks in public, she has an amazing way with words and her depth of thinking and an ease of delivery are wonderful to listen to. With an interesting background coming to testing from being a professional chef, she brings in diverse, practical perspectives where her great skills in expressing herself make her invaluable.

 

15. Ashley Hunsberger (USA)
@aahunsberger

With over a decade in testing educational technology, Ashley is passionate about learning and the user experience, and believes quality is everyone’s responsibility! As an Product Quality Architect at Blackboard, Inc, she loves helping to strategize and facilitate testing, working with teams to incorporate those strategies into their development. Ashley shares her experiences through blogging or speaking at conferences, and volunteers as part of the organizing committee for the Selenium Conference.

 

16. Aya Akl (Egypt)
@AyaAkl

Aya works as a senior automation test engineer at Instabug, and wants to change the world with keen interest in testing, mobile testing in particular. As a tester, she both automates and explores. She has published a great list of things she loves about testing on Medium, and we expect to see a lot more from her in the future.

 

17. Bhagya Perera (UK)
@bhagyagdm

Bhagya works as a senior Test Analyst at Reed Business Information. She’s a tester and a developer, and loves all sides of the testing craft. Seen around conferences in UK, she has become known for her enthusiasm on taking ideas to practice, and in addition to bringing things to her company, she actively shares her experiences. She is starting her speaker career and when her LinkedIn profile says she has skills in time management, she does not exaggerate at all.

 

18. Carly Dyson (UK)
@carlymdyson

Carly is an IT consultant specializing amongst other things in testing. Her specialties are requirements gathering, test management and non-functional testing, and she knows a lot of all things testing.  She currently works in IT Operations.

 

19. Carol Brands (USA)
@CSBrands

Carol works as a software tester at DNV GL Software in Oregon where she acts as an internal facilitator and coach. She has spoken at several conferences, and is a student of Miagi-Do School of Testing. She is also known for volunteering and is currently helping out in finding mentors for new speakers with Speak Easy. You can see an example of her speaking here: https://youtu.be/RgcNgabDN_c .

 

20. Cassandra Leung (UK)
@Tweet_Cassandra

Cassandra is a tester, UX enthusiast, blogger and speaker. As a speaker she’s been to many conferences since she started, ramping up her speaking career in almost record time. She blogs regularly and her blog posts are a lovely read at http://www.cassandrahl.com/blog/.

 

21. Catherine Carena (Australia)

Catherine is Managing Consultant and identifies as a software test education advocate and is trainer and organiser for the KickStart Academy Software Test programme. She volunteers with Association for Software Testing to teach BBST courses. Her blog is at https://peepsweave.wordpress.com/.

 


22. Christina Ohanian (UK)
@ctohanian

Christina is an agile coach, but the first thing that tends to come to mind with her is superb sketchnoting that many conferences have got to enjoy. In addition to reporting through images, Christina of course also delivers. She is a delightful speaker with relevant messages.

 

23. Christin Wiedemann (Canada)
@c_wiedemann

Christin is Chief Scientist and co-CEO at PQA Testing. Coming to testing from particle physics and to Canada from Sweden, she contributes in the international community. She has been conference chair for the Association for Software Testing and speaks in various conferences. Christin blogs at https://christintesting.wordpress.com/.

 

24. Christina Thalayasingam (Sri Lanka)
@ChristinaThalay

Christina is a test automation expert, specializing in Selenium and JMeter. Her current work role is senior software QA Automation Engineer at Zaizi. She shares her experiences through speaking and blogging, and we look forward to hearing more from her in the future!

 

25. Claire Moss (USA)
@aclairefication

While Claire has deep expertise in exploratory testing, she often works in the development, DevOps, and product ownership. She was program chair for all three years of the STAC conference in Atlanta. Founder of Ministry of Testing Atlanta, she is passionate about inclusive community for testing enthusiasts. She speaks and facilitates workshops at many conferences. She uses her evil powers for good by blogging at http://aclairefication.com/.

 

26. Claire Reckless (UK)
@clairereckless

Claire works as a Senior QA Engineer at Avecto. In addition to contributing at her work, she speaks at conferences and participates in the international testing community. She’s written some really great articles with Ministry of Testing.

 

27. Clare Fromme (USA)

@clare_bare_82

Clare is a Senior Web Producer at Box in the heart of Silicon Valley. She works with both engineers and business owners to create technical and functional requirements, and is an advocate and contributor to QA to ensure those needs are met, while also helping to facilitate User Acceptance Testing.

 

28. Corina Pip (Romania)
@imalittletester

Corina is a Senior QA Automation Consultant at NTT DATA Romania. Her focus is on testing by means of Java, Selenium, TestNG, Spring, Maven and other cool frameworks and tools. You find Corina at conferences and she blogs at https://iamalittletester.wordpress.com.

 

29. Dawn Haynes (USA)
@DawnMHaynes

Dawn is CEO & Testing Yogini at PerfTestPlus. Dawn is particularly passionate about improving the state of testing across the industry and has served as a former Director and Secretary of the Association for Software Testing, and is a founding member of the International Society for Software Testing. She speaks at conferences and drives things forward on many fronts.

 

30. Deborah Lee (UK)
@DeborahLee89

Deborah tests websites and mobile apps, and is recommended by her peers. She’s a regular attendee of many Testing Conferences including Test Bash, London Tester Gathering and a mentor at the Software Testing Clinic.

 

31. Dorothy Graham (UK)
@DorothyGraham

Dorothy Graham is an independent consultant. She draws from her extensive experience and network, and has the knowledge with decades in the industry and popular books of testing basics to experiences in automation. She is a popular speaker, and helps organize so many types of things we can’t begin to write them.

 

32. Ekaterina (Katja) Budnikov (Germany)
@KatjaBudnikov

Katja is a QA lead interested in test automation. She works with agile and has wonderful insights into how to make BDD work. She’s active on twitter and shares lovely sketchnotes. She also blogs: http://www.katjasays.com/.

 

33. Elisabeth Hendrickson (USA)
@testobsessed

Elisabeth’s Explore It! book on exploratory testing situates her firmly as a thought leader for testers. In everything she does, she inspires others to incorporate aspects of modern testing in their work. She would say she is no longer a tester but a vice president of R&D for a relevant product company. However, her testing heuristics cheat sheet is one of the most cited resources in the field and immortalizes her as a tester forever.

 

34. Elizabeth Zagroba (USA)
@ezagroba

Known as the self-described introvert, Elizabeth talks about leveraging the strengths of these introverted qualities in testing. She has a specialty in experimenting under time pressure. Elizabeth’s moonwalking skills will surprise & delight you and her writings describe the growth arc of a modern tester and can be found at https://medium.com/@ezagroba.

 

35. Emily Bache (Sweden)
@emilybache

Emily is a programmer, known for many things but in particular for her focus on hands-on practice and deep expertise on approval testing (a form of golden master testing, and she is an author of one of the open source tools in this area). Emily has written a book on Dojos and authored numerous little problems to practice around, e.g. unit testing.

 

36. Emma Armstrong (UK)
@EmmaATester

Emma contributes heavily on the conference scene as both a presenter and a volunteer in program committees. In her role as a test manager, she knows her way around various systems and approaches to testing. Without closing her eyes for the other aspects relevant to testing, Emma is an embodiment of a technical tester. She’s one of those ‘ask me anything’ people. Find her testing katas on her blog at https://taooftesting.co.uk/.

 

37. Emma Keaveny (UK)
@EmJayKay80

Emma’s shares her journey of serendipitously happening upon the testing community to becoming a skilled and witty presenter. Emma is a gem. While she may warn about the swear words that occasionally pop up, her content is great and you can see an example of this in her Dark Patterns talk.

 

38. Faiza Yousuf (Pakistan)
@faizayousuf

Faiza is best known in her own neighborhood, where she regularly ends up being interviewed in a magazine. She reads a lot, shares a lot on twitter and blogs at http://faizayousuf.blogspot.fi. Her interest is all around the tech industry, and she’s active in Women in Tech groups.

 

39. Fanny Pittack (Germany)
@studienratFanny

Fanny is an agile coach and change agent who advocates testing everything early and often in the software development life cycle. She pair presents fun and insightful keynotes and workshops at international testing conferences.

 

40. Felienne Hermans (Netherlands)
@Felienne

Felienne is a university professor and a programmer, yet found often deep in the realms of testing. Her specialty in addition to her current passion of teaching kids better is on seeing programming (and testing) in places others don’t first consider. Her insights on getting excel sheets, the world’s most popular unstructured programming platform, under tests.

 

41. Fiona Charles (Canada)
@FionaCCharles

Fiona is a go-to keynote speaker or workshop presenter. She co-founded Speak Easy with Anne-Marie Charrett that helps loads of new speakers find their voice and strengthen their message for public speaking. She actively shares her testing wisdom and embodies the word expert test consultant and manager.

 

42. Gem Hill (UK)
@Gem_Hill

Gem is a serial podcaster and an awesome tester. She hosts Let’s Talk About Tests Baby, a podcast that focuses on testing. She is also one of a growing number of voices bravely speaking about Mental Health issues in the world of tech and testing. Her podcasts inspire others to speak out about struggles that otherwise remain hidden.

 

43. Gita Malinovska (UK)
@Gita_m

Gita works as Software Quality Assurance Tester at Medsleuth. She’s an international speaker, who started her speaking through SpeakEasy and quickly got accepted to many conferences.

 

44. Goranka Bjedov (USA)

Goranka works as a capacity engineer at Facebook. She’s an international speaker and all around wonderful. To find her online, go to Youtube and look at one of her talks. They’re all worth a watch.

 

45. Guna Petrova (Latvia)
@alt_lv

Guna has a sparkling personality and deep commitment to being useful as a tester. Over the years, she’s overcome her fears in public speaking and shares valuable stuff in conferences as speaker, organizer and volunteer.

 

46. Gwen Diagram (UK)
@gwendiagram

Gwen is a hands-on startup all-things-devops-and-testing expert. The energy she radiates in infectious! If you’re lucky enough to hear one of her lightning talks at a conference, she’ll truly rock you with both her content and delivery. You may see her around conferences as she is an speaker that rocks her stage.

 

47. Heather Reid (Ireland)
@heather_reiduff

Heather is Test and Automation Engineer at Moo.la. She contributes as Exploristics' Tester, ensuring that their product meets customer expectations, performing acceptance, regression and exploratory testing, and has hands-on experience on Selenium WebDriver. She is active in the Ministry of Testing Communities.

 

48. Helena Jeret-Mae (Estonia)
@HelenaJ_M

Helena has recently turned independent, and over the years she has contributed heavily in her own company but also the wider community in Estonia. She has active ties with Nordic Testing Days and she speaks in conferences around the world.

 

49. Hilary Weaver-Robb (USA)
@g33klady

Hilary works as a Software Quality Assurance Architect at Quickens Loans and resides in Detroit. She helps people develop their skills and determines best ways to do job at hand in testing. She runs the Motor City Software Testers user group and speaks at conferences. She regularly live-tweets conference sessions and you’ll feel like you’re in the room!

 

50. Isabel Evans (UK)
@IsabelE_Test

Isabel is independent quality and testing consultant with over 30 years of experience. Her special interests are in people, both in encouraging IT teams and customers to work together, but also understanding that software is made for people and the user’s experience matters. Isabel is an international speaker and delightful storyteller.

 

51. Janet Gregory (Canada)
@janetgregoryca

Janet co-authored the books Agile Testing and More Agile Testing, the leading resources for testers in the agile space. Her collaborative video training series is being released this year. You’ll find her keynoting conferences and leading track workshops around the world. She’s a household name in testing and a popular trainer. Janet blogs at http://janetgregory.ca/blog/

 

52. Jean Ann Harrison (USA)
@JA_Harrison

Jean Ann loves working with Mobile Testing, and learn everything there is in that real. She actively shares her learnings and helps others. She’s a mobile testing guru. You could run into her in many of the testing conferences.

 

53. Jeanine Rust (USA)
@architestgirl

Jeanine is senior automation engineer at Nordstrom who knows an amazing number of technologies. In recent years she has focused on acceptance test driven development with Cucumber and SpecFlow, using that as a chance of bringing together all roles.

 

54. Jessica Ingrasselino (USA)
@jess_ingrass

Jessica works as Senior Technical Staff (QA) at Salesforce. She is an active pythonista, community organizer for NYC PyLadies and author of a book teaching Python to kids. Her depth and width of understanding testing, and hands-on ability to perform are inspiring.

 

55. JoEllen Carter (USA)
@testacious

JoEllen is a frequent presenter at international agile and testing conferences. She loves figuring out how things work - and don’t work - in teams and looks for ways she can make positive contributions. Her broad expertise includes mobile and API testing. She blogs at http://testacious.com

 

56. Julia Duran (Spain)
@AdharaIT

Julia is manager of testing area for Software Labs of Indra, and an active contributor for TMMi and Spanish Software Testing Qualification Board. She volunteers with conference organizing, and has contributed to ExpoQA, Testing Portugal and European Testing Conference.

 

57. Julie Gardiner (UK)
@cheekytester

Julie has been around for testing for some decades, and is a wonderful, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable speaker in many testing conferences. She’s earned her reputation over long time of delivering talks on various topics all around the world with multiple best presenter awards to show.

 

58. Jyothi Rangaiah (India)
@aarjay

Jyothi is the editor of Women Testers Magazine and an international conference speaker. She works with AstraZeneca as a Test Manager. Read her insights here: http://chroniclesoftesting.blogspot.in  

 

59. Karen Greaves (South Africa)
@karen_greaves

Karen is really good at listening to teams, understanding their problems and helping them grow. She blogged frequently on a variety of agile topic with easy to apply tips and tricks. Best known for the image known as Testing Manifesto and the book series “Coaches Guide to” - which she co-authored with Samantha Laing.

 

60. Karen N. Johnson (USA)
@karennjohnson

Known for insightful and touching presentations, Karen is a popular speaker at conferences around the world. She wrote the chapter “Software in Use” for the book Beautiful Testing and she is a prolific author of articles. Her testing heuristics flash cards collection is a great priming for exploratory testing!

 

61. Kate Falanga (USA)
@Squidish_QA

Kate has made a bit of fame as the tester role marketer, advising all of us to sell our brand. She’s presented in many conferences and works as a Director of QA at Huge in New York. 

 

62. Katrina Clokie (New Zealand)
@katrina_tester

Katrina just published her book A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps, which garnered over a thousand readers in its first week! Her testing pathway blog series is widely cited as an excellent way to begin testing in various fields. She is the go-to person for delightful testing wisdom. She works as a testing coach, growing her team of testers in size, knowledge and skill.

 

63. Kim Engel (Australia)
@kengel100

Kim has worked in Software Testing for over 17 years. She has been instrumental in expanding the awareness and practice of context-driven testing in New Zealand, and has recently returned to Australia. She enjoys sharing her experience with others in published articles, presentations, workshops, during coaching sessions and via her blog www.isitgoodenoughyet.com

 

64. Kim Knup (UK)
@Punkmik

Kim is Head of Test at Matchbox Mobile. On the side, she organizes Brighton tester meetup TestActually. She is passionate about usability and likes to do what the user (apparently) would never do which makes her a great tester. She shares her lessons in conferences as a speaker, but is a brilliant companion on any hallway track.

 

65. Kinga Witko (Poland)
@KingaTest

Kinga is active facilitator in her community growing her reach from local to international. She identifies as geek girl and a tester, and is full of excited energy on making this profession better for herself and others. She blogs at https://kingatest.wordpress.com

 

66. Kristel Kruustük (Estonia)
@kristelviidik

Kristel is a founder of a successful crowdsourcing platform Testlio. She started her testing career in 2009 and quickly became frustrated with the shortcomings of traditional QA and crowdsourcing, and directed her frustration on working on a solution. She’s an awesome businesswoman and an entrepreneur, and her story of how she built a company around a problem she personally experienced is inspiring.

 

67. Lanette Creamer (USA)
@lanettecream

Lanette is known for imaginative presentations and workshops where she creates an excellent learning experience for participants while chugging Diet Coke and wearing fabulous cat shoes. She is a long-time tester, quality advocate, writer, and international presenter. She is dedicated to whole team quality in her current role as a Software Test Pilot. Her humor brightens her insightful writing as well.

 

68. Leah Stockley (Singapore)
@leahjstockley

Leah has a long experience in software testing for consultancies, banks and software houses across multiple industries. She is known for training and coaching testers to be innovative, empowered and to continually improve in testing. Her blog is at http://inspiredtester.com  

 

69. Lina Zubyte (Hungary)

Lina is a tester working in Hungary, where she also facilitates the PalinQA meetup. She is originally from Lithuania and with a drastic career move ended up with a startup as its first full-time tester. You can find Lina in some conferences, but if you’re ever around in Budapest and up for a great discussion on testing, get in touch with her. 

 

70. Lisa Crispin (USA)
@lisacrispin

Co-author of Agile Testing and More Agile Testing, Lisa has profoundly impacted on both the agile and testing communities. Lisa frequently shares her experiences through keynotes, conference talks, and workshops. Her collaborative video training series is being released this year. She does hands-on testing on a daily basis and you can see her testing remotely with her team even when she is at conferences. Always giving of her time, she is a mentor to so many in the field.

 

71. Lisi (Elisabeth) Hocke (Germany)
@lisihocke

Lisi is an agile tester who like so many of us stumbled into testing. She is especially passionate about the whole-team approach to testing and quality as well as the agile culture mindset behind it. Building great products which deliver value together with great people is what motivates her and keeps her going. Now she shares her learnings and enjoyment in a blog, and is starting to appear in testing conferences. You can find her blog at www.lisihocke.com

 

72. Liz Keogh (UK)
@lunivore

Liz insists she is not a tester but a developer - really she is a brilliant developer who tests! Known as a guru of behavior-driven development, her insightful automation solutions address the verification side of testing. Her conference talks inspire investigation and deep learning. She frequently evangelizes the Cynefin framework. She blogs at https://lizkeogh.com/

 

73. Louise Perold (South Africa)
@lperold

Louise is Director at House of Testing Consulting South Africa. She is known as the power figure behind Let’s Test South Africa. A passionate exploratory tester and a specialist in the financial sector testing.

 

74. Lynn McKee (Canada)
@lyn_mckee

Lynn is an international speaker.  Her passion is helping organizations, teams, and individuals deliver valuable software. Lynn is an advocate of quality software management practices and provides consulting on quality software management, leadership, and testing.

 

75. Maaike Brinkhof (Netherlands)
@maaikees

Maaike is an independent agile testing consultant with a wonderfully down-to-earth approach to working together with the teams. As an exploratory tester, she is one that mixes automation with the approaches and is a representative of the new generation of blurring the lines of manual (thinking) and automation. She a deep thinker, and you can see her around in conferences sharing her wisdom. Her blog is https://www.maaikebrinkhof.nl/

 

76. Maaret Pyhäjärvi (Finland)
@maaretp

Maaret received Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person at Agile Testing Days 2016. She keynotes testing conferences and works as “just a tester” at F-Secure, although she believes no one is really “just” anything. She’s also a programmer, speaker, sponsor, and mentor of new voices in test conferences. As a community builder, you will see her as a meetup facilitator and conference organizer running the European Testing Conference. She remixed Mob Programming and testing to create Mob Testing, a powerful exploratory technique. She is a prolific and avid blogger, so expect a new blog post several times a week at http://visible-quality.blogspot.com

 

77. Maja Schreiner (Switzerland)
@majaschreiner

Maja works at Swisscom with testing, and has a career of 15 years in mix of software development and quality engineering. She’s big into agile testing practices in everyday work, and her deep insights are a joy to listen to. Usually the chance to get to hear her requires you hang out in Zurich, where she has been running the Agile Testing Meetup Zurich for a few years. She has a blog, http://testmotion.wordpress.com that you might want to check out.

 

78. Maria Kedemo (Sweden)
@mariakedemo

Maria speaks in conferences internationally and is an amazing test manager and tester at House of Test. Her drive to help others grow their testing skills and to grow her own is delightful. For years, she has contributed to the Oredev development conference as well as several others in the testing space.

 

79. Marianne Duijst (Netherlands)
@marianneduijst

Marianne is a software engineer with an emphasis on testing at Rabobank. She is a proud IT Nerd, and one of the developers who have found testing fascinating enough to focus on it. You can find her in conferences, learning and sharing enthusiastically.

 

80. Mari Carmen Ramirez (Spain)
@emerrefe

Mari Carmen is one of Valencia’s gifts to the testing world and she works at Flywire. Since her online presence including her blog https://emerrefe.github.io/qa-blog/ is in Spanish, you need to pay attention on how to find her. She’s contributed with Whiteboard testing and you can every now and then spot her in conferences and have amazing discussions.

 

81. Marjana Shammi (Netherlands)
@mshammi

Marjana works as DevOps and Test Manager at Ice Mobile. You may find her regularly speaking on experiences, in particular around DevOps, in various conferences.

 

82. Marlena Compton (USA)

Starting her career as a tester, Marlena table flipped into full-stack programmer. She’s a true full stack tester who knows her way in and out of all the development activities including testing. Marlena’s wonderful blog is at http://marlenacompton.com/

 

83. Mary Agbro (UK)

Mary works as Software Test Engineer at Financial Times and has over a decade of experience. Recently she has worked with test environment management, but during the years has built a strong foundation of the testing profession.

 

84. Meaghan Lewis (USA)
@iammeaghanlewis

Meaghan Lewis is a passionate quality engineer who loves all things testing. She is skilled in automation for both web and mobile applications and an advocate for embedding quality throughout software delivery practices. Meaghan works at Lever in San Francisco where she is testing software that is revolutionising the hiring process. Meaghan loves to learn and share new things about agile testing, continuous delivery, and micro-services. You can learn more about Meaghan at http://meaghanlewis.com/

 

85. Meike Mertsch (Sweden)
@MeikeMertsch

Meike is an exploratory tester, author, and German book translator. She is an experienced speaker and workshop facilitator on topics such as Personal Kanban. Her professional interests include agile testing, functional programming languages, and pair programming. Her blog is http://agiletester.webnode.com

 

86. Melissa Eaden (USA)
@melthetester

Melissa Eaden is a tester at ThoughtWorks. On the side, she helps with Ministry of Testing and helps people write their thoughts more clearly to be published as Testing Planet articles on the Dojo. Mel is a frequent conference-goer and a starting conference speaker.

 

87. Michele Playfair (Australia)
@MichelePlayfair

Michele is a tester who works at Xero. She lives in Melbourne Australia. She’s a speaker. Awesome in too many ways, sharing great stuff.

 

88. Mieke Gevers (Belgium)
@QAperf

Mieke has been in software testing for more than twenty-five years, and has become a specialist in the testing techniques and processes relating to Test Automation and Performance Testing & Monitoring. Mieke shares her experiences frequently, at conferences and seminars worldwide. She contributes as an organizer and volunteer with various organizations, and runs her own conference BTD, the International Conference on Business, Testing & Developing.

 

89. Mirjana Kolarov (Serbia)
@mirjanakolarov

Mirjana is Test Architect at Levi9 IT Services. She is a co-founder of the Serbian tester community, Test’RS Club and shares with her local community as well as internationally. Her recent focus on speaking on experiences she has on performance testing and monitoring is what she is most known for, but she has a great overall understanding of testing.

 

90. Mor Shaul (Israel)
@temorel

Mor is a new star, just starting her journey on the international fame. Her work has been to focus on shifting testing left after agile transformation, and finding the new ways of influencing when involved early.

 

91. Nancy Kelln (Canada)
@nkelln

Nancy is a passionate and enthusiastic tester and test manager and an international speaker. Her specialty is pragmatism in providing adaptive testing approaches in both agile and traditional testing teams. By now you realize that she is all kinds of awesome. She blogs at http://www.unimaginedtesting.ca/

 

92. Natalie Bennett (USA)
@bennett_nj

Natalie is a hard-core programmer with an explorer specialty at Pivotal Cloud Foundry. The specialty means that she is known for helping others to expand their thinking horizons. She is known to be one of the two explorers at Pivotal Cloud Foundry working with hundreds of engineers and her stories of what work looks like are fascinating.

 

93. Nathalie Rooseboom DeVries (Netherlands)
@FunTESTic

Nathalie, whose Twitter handle describes her perfectly, is a Managing Test Consultant in the Netherlands and a highly creative presenter and facilitator at international testing conferences. She has even embedded testing into her hobby as Casualty Simulation victim, where she 'tests' first-aiders, first responders and medical personnel. She’s a leader in testing financial and public transport domains, and practices system testing “with an attitude”.

 

94. Nicola Owen (Sweden)
@NicolaO55

Nicola is Test Consultant at House of Test and a Kiwi in Sweden. She’s originally from New Zealand, that is. She was the founder of the Stockholm Software Testing Talks meet-up and a co-founder of the WeTest Auckland testing meet-up. And she teaches on the BBST Foundations course. Speaking at conferences and speaking in general (ToastMasters) is her thing. She blogs at http://nickytests.blogspot.fi/

 

95. Nicola Sedgwick (UK)
@nicolasedgwick

Nicola does coaching and test management in collaborative teams. That is, when she isn’t moving people to tears with her talks in conferences. Her workshops and talks speak from a vast personal experience with a brave voice that is unique.

 

96. Parimala Hariprasad (India)
@curioustester

Parimala works as a senior UX Architect at Amadeus IT Group. With over a decade of experience in figuring out what to build for the users, she also knows her way around testing. If you ask to name one tester from India, Parimala is the name that comes to mind as she has shared her expertise in conferences for years.

 

97. Preethi Thomas (USA)
@preethit

Preethi is a quality engineer with a passion for software quality. She is an open-source software enthusiast and contributor.

 

98. Raji Bhamidipati (UK)
@raji_bh

Raji is Agile Test Lead at National Grid. She’s a community organizer and a speaker, and a published author. You can find her blog at https://raji.me

 

99. Raluca Morariu (Romania)
@schumitza

Raluca is a developer turned tester, and works with Betfair and identifies as an evangelist for continuous integration and test automation. Her talks on automation are insightful and practical, and she is brilliant. There’s already been plenty of chances to catch her in international conferences.

 

100. Rhian Lewis (UK)
@rhian_is

Agile SDET into blockchain, a super-expert in the cryptocurrency area. She is a co-founder of London Bitcoin Women and varies her location between Germany and UK serving consulting customers.

 

101. Rikke Simonsen (Denmark)
@vanilleDK

Rikke is known for things like BDD, Agile and Testing. Finding her way around requirements and collaboration, she has shared her experiences in behavior-driven development in conferences.

 

102. Rosie Sherry (UK)
@rosiesherry

As the founder of Ministry of Testing, Rosie is the most loved tester in the world! She has dedicated her life to helping testers learn, grow, and network. As a change agent in the testing world, her smart business sense integrates with deep insight into the testing profession and its future. We all love Rosie!

 

103. Ru Cindrea (Finland)
@ru_altom

Ru is a founder of Altom with head office in Romania and a branch in Finland. She is a guru of test automation especially on the mobile platform, a true gadget geek. With her practical no-nonsense attitude, she makes a difference in any project she takes up. She runs the Helsinki Agile Testing meetup group and delivers insightful talks of various topics in International conferences.

 

104. Sally Goble (UK)
@sallygoble

Sally is Head of Quality at Guardian. She shares on topics on applying DevOps style of development and finding new insightful ways of including testing practices. She is an international speaker and helps organizing conferences e.g. as a member of program committees such as Test Automation Day 2017.

 

105. Samantha Connelly (Australia)
@sammy_lee12

Sam Connelly could be described as a motorbike riding, robotics obsessed, girl geek. She is a Test Engineer at EPAM Systems; she prefers 'quality activist', or even 'product risk identifier' as her title. Mobile Explorative testing is her speciality and she is also the Leader of the Sydney Testers meetup group. Sam credits a technical background and a curious mind as being her major drivers in her pursuits. She has previously hosted her own community radio show and started a Robogals chapter in Tasmania.

 

106. Samantha Laing (South Africa)
@samlaing

Samantha is an agile coach who appreciates the difficulties of testing in agile. She comes from a developer background started with TDD and grew to testing for understanding . She is best known for the image known as Testing Manifesto and the book series “Coaches Guide to” which she co-authored with Karen Greaves.
Her writings are available at http://www.growingagile.co.za

 


107. Selena Delesie (Canada)
@SelenaDelesie

Selena is Executive and Leadership Coach with a tester / test manager background. With her various conference talks, she’s become known for teaching leadership skills and caring as part of it. She works as independent and you can find her often speaking in conferences.

 

108. Seretta Gamba (Germany)

Seretta works as a test manager at ISS Software GmbH and is a recognized automation expert. With more than 30 years of experience, the width and depth of experience shows if you get a chance to see her speak. She’s contributed a chapter of her experience to the book Experiences of Test Automation by Dorothy Graham and Mark Fewster.

 

109. Sharon Robson (Australia)
@SMRobson

Sharon presents at conferences around the globe. Any conference with Sharon in attendance has extra energy! She is a longtime leader in agile, testing, and software education. She researches and writes papers on agile test approaches in various business domains.

 

110. Sheekha Singh (USA)
@ssheekha

Sheekha is QA Engineer at D3 Banking, located in Omaha, Nebraska. Over the years, she’s been both a programmer and a tester and in addition to usability focus in design, she is a Selenium expert. She is a speaker at various technical conferences and blogs at https://sheekhasingh.com/

 

111. Sherry Heinze (Canada)

Sherry has extensive experience in so many areas. She’s a tester, test strategist, quality process analyst, trainer and coach, tech writer and business analyst. Sherry facilitates LAWST-style workshops. She devotes time to mentoring and helping people make beneficial connections with each other.

 

112. Shirin Bashar (USA)

Shirin tests software in New York, USA. She likes learning new techniques to improve testing, and make sense of the world of testing. You most definitely don’t know her yet, but you should. She blogs at http://testingtome.com 

 

113. Sigrid Eldh (Sweden)
@DrSEldh

Dr Sigrid Eldh, I presume. A brilliant expert of combining the academic and industry views of testing, with decades of industry experience and a dissertation behind her. Has been a moving force for Swedish Association for Software Testing and various research projects around testing.

 

114. Smita Mishra (India)
@smitapmishra

A product entrepreneur with a tester background, Smita is a founder of Fandoro. She regularly organizes STPCon and speaks on testing topics.

 

115. Sneha Bhat (UK)
@snehasbhat

Sneha is a senior software tester and Scrum Master at Linguamatics, based in Cambridge. She works with test automation and blogs about her ideas at https://thoughtsofsnehabhat.wordpress.com/

 

116. Stacy Kirk (USA)
@queenofagileqa

Stacy is a CEO/Founder of QualityWorks and a champion for software quality. Her specialty technology-wise in testing is NodeJS yet she knows her way around businesses, application and technologies.

 

117. Stephanie Dukes (USA)
@StephDFig

Stephanie is a Senior Engineering Manager in Quality at Credit Karma. She works with a team of Engineers and SEITs for full coverage of the finTech software she is happy to support. Stephanie speaks about personal finance and the software that empowers the public to be more aware of their financial standing. Having built up many teams in test now, Stephanie has much to say around testing and the tools necessary to build out both manual and automation scopes for such technology.

 

118. Teri Charles (USA)
@booksrg8

Teri is a senior software tester at Willis Towers Watson, located in Boulder, Colorado. With over a decade of experience, she takes her craft of testing seriously and studies, practices, teaches and mentors to keep herself up to date. She is a past organizer of the Boulder QA Meetup and continues to be an active member of the international testing community.

 

119. Trish Khoo (Australia)
@hogfish

With over 10 years of experience in software engineering, Trish has a focus on team productivity, tools and infrastructure, test automation, risk mitigation, and organizational change. She like things to release more often and break less often. She’s worked for startups, enterprise corporations, government, and consultancies. You can watch her CAST2014 keynote.

 

120. Ulrika Malmgren (Sweden)
@Ulrikama

Ulrika is a tester turned mob programmer, who learned the importance of collaboration in making testing - that is important work - also engaging. She is delightful, insightful, and just amazing professional. She shares her lessons in conferences and believes that it is work that should be paid for.

 

121. Venetia Foo (UK)
@Foo_V

Venetia is an amazing hands-on tester, warmly recommended by her colleagues. In addition to doing her own job well, she grows people around her in awesomeness. While she might not be the most visible in the testing social media scene, she is one to keep an eye on and learn from.

 

122. Vesna Leonard (All over planet Earth)
@worX4you

Vesna has a fascinating story of how she works with testing. She travels the world in a van and works remotely through her own consultancy. Every now and then she shows up at a testing conference and shares both on the lifestyle of a digital nomad but also on how to get testing done successfully in various types of cases.

 

123. Viktorija Manevska (Macedonia)
@Iki_Kviki

Starting as a Scrum Master, Viki quickly found her taste for testing. She has a lot of energy and bursts with new ideas, never short of enthusiasm. Her greatest passion is to guide her team to be independent and able to adopt cutting-edge methods. Her goal is to develop a team which would understand change as a learning process rather than a goal. She started speaking at conferences early in her career to share her stories with the community.

 

124. Vivien Ibiyemi (Sweden)
@VivienIbiyemi

Listening to Vivien speak is to be transported to a world where innovation and collaboration are obvious. She shares patterns for the testing craft born of deep insight into value delivery. Sharing and collaboration really is her thing, and it makes her a perfect example of an agile tester.

 


125. Wanda Hawkins (UK)

Wanda works as Engineer in Test for Dunelm in Leicestershire, UK. She is endorsed as wise professional with huge knowledge, and a forward-thinking tester who knows her way around testing, change management and projects.

 

This list is in progress and continues at Next  Awesome 125 Testers You Should Keep Your Eye On Always

About Anne-Marie Charrett

Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie Charrett is a software tester, trainer and coach with a reputation of excellence and passion for quality and the craft of software testing. An electronic engineer by trade, software testing chose her when she started testing protocols against European standards.

Anne-Marie advocates a whole team approach to quality, with a focus on removing threats to quality. She sees software testing as a skilled activity that many might perform. She trains & coaches teams to embrace this approach to quality with a contextual mindset.

In the past, Anne-Marie has developed software testing courses and lectured at the University of Technology, Sydney, and ran the Sydney Testers Meetup. 

Along with Fiona Charles, Anne-Marie co-founded Speak Easy Diversity, an initiative to help increase diversity at tech conferences.