Next 125 Awesome Testers You Should Keep Your Eye on Always

Next 125 Awesome Testers You Should Keep Your Eye on Always

WiT working party (Claudia Badell, Guna Petrova, Anne-Marie Charrett, Lisa Crispin, Nicola Sedgwick, Lisi Hocke, Ale Moreira, Ashley Hunsberger, Alex Schladebeck, Claire Moss and others)

Testing is critically important. Paraphrasing the awesome Ash Coleman, testing is about telling stories about the software and we need diverse views into telling diverse stories. This second list in the series of Awesome Testers focuses on extending our geographical diversity. Tester awesomeness is global, and we are just getting started on recognizing it. 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!

See the previous article at Agile Testing Days Blog.

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 Next 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 that came to mind that deserve to be on this list of awesome testers.

 

1. Adina Moldovan (Romania)
@adinnaplus
Adina is known for her work with the Test Lab, traveling around conferences, dressing up in a lab coat and driving the rest of us through all sorts of testing efforts and exercises. Adina is a great tester, with positiveness that is infectious. She works with Altom.
 

2. Aldina Codesso-Lipponen (Finland)
@aldina_c_l

Aldina works with Kone, the elevator company doing much more than elevators. She excels at building connections in a heterogenous tech environment testing through driving test automation tools. Her stories and experiences on the large-scale test automation they’ve built around Robot Framework are relevant, and you’re losing out unless you find out what she has to say.

 

3. Aleksandra Kornecka (Poland)
@AleKo_tweets

Aleksandra is one of the testing power people in Poland. She self-describes as quality evangelist and exorcist (when needed). Like so many of us, she mixes manual and automated testing and her current world includes Selenium and Python. As an avid learner, she is never stopping on enhancing her skills.

 

4. Alfonsina Morgavi (Argentina)

Alfonsina has more than 25 years of experience in quality assurance and quality control. She co-founded QActions System SRL and has lectured at different conferences. She represents the Hispanic America Software Testing Qualification Board - HASTQB at Argentina.

 

5. Alison Wade (USA)
@awadesqe

Alison runs Women Who Test that she founded, and is President at Techwell. We see her at Techwell conferences, meeting and greeting people and taking forward the knowledge of testing.

 

6. Almudena Vivanco (Spain)

@MrsDaehin

Almudena is a Performance engineer at Cybersecurity department in Telefónica I+D. With a strong expertise in high availability and scalability systems, she focuses in load testing, performance analysis and tuning of services and infrastructures. She has worked with several different tools in different platforms. She studied Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at Oviedo University. She has been a speaker at DevOpsDays, Expo:QA, GTC, Velocity and VLCTesting conferences and meetups. You can find her presentations at https://www.slideshare.net/almudenavivanco/presentations. She is member of Girls in tech Spain.

 

7. Amalia Alvarez (Uruguay)

@amaalvarezbalbi

Amalia has been an independent consultant for the last twenty years, specializing amongst other things in software quality assurance. She spreads the word of quality teaching software quality at the university, tweeting regularly, as a speaker when the opportunity comes and supporting the World Conference on Software Quality. She supports the idea of “shift left” testing. She believes that quality has a lot to do with developing a suitable product for all the stakeholders and that involves testing; but also at a reasonable cost, so prevention is a key element of the quality costs.

 

8. Amanda Dean (Australia)
@MsAmandaDean

Amanda is a senior test manager for Planit Software Testing, who has experienced testing in different kinds of projects. With a decade in testing and consulting, she’s worked with a lot of different industries, technologies and types of people. She loves making people the best versions of themselves, and speaks in conferences to share her lessons.

 

9. Amanda Nobil (USA)

@AmandaNobil
Amanda works with Medidata as a test jumper. She is particularly into web and mobile testing, having a strong understanding on browsers and mobile devices. She knows her way around accessibility testing, but also lots of programming languages and test automation tools. She merrily tackles testing organizational issues, and her favorite question is, "Wait, but why?"

 

10. Amanda Shankle-Knowlton (USA)
Amanda has 12 years of testing behind her, and 11 of it in the same company. She has recently taken up the role of a manager after years of testing, and radiates caring of the people she manages. Her blog is at http://amandashankleknowlton.blogspot.fi

 

11. Amy E. Brown (USA)
@MiddleNameIsWhy

Amy is technical writer and software tester for Intersystems. She leads her teams into better quality asking excellent questions, and gets different teams asking for her contributions. She’s a careful and thorough explorer, with a variety of technical skills and love for big data.

 

12. Ana Prpic (Croatia)
@a_prpic

Ana is a quality assurance engineer with her specialties being mentoring, process improvement, exploratory testing and automated checking. She blogs at https://medium.com/@a_prpic

 

13. Andrea Fox (USA)
@TestFox26

Andrea is a senior test analyst at Cerner, where she writes, runs and teaches all things testing related. With one major conference talk under her belt, she actively seeks opportunities to network and share on testing. Scenario-based testing is one of her things.

 

14. Anna Brutskaya (USA)
Anna works as a Senior QA engineer at Blue Apron. She’s lead testing efforts and acted as a tester - scrum master mix. With her attention to detail, she knows her products thoroughly and is a respected team member.

 

15. Anna Hoff (Sweden)
@Anna_Hoff

Anna is working as a test consultant, with an experience in various different projects as tester and test lead. She speaks in conferences, has been a frequent speaker at EuroSTAR and also a EuroSTAR program committee member for 2016 and 2017 edition. Needless to say: keynotes are in her repertoire.

 

16. Anne Colder (Netherlands)

@annosofie
Anne Colder is a passionate test automation engineer, who entered the world of testing as a molecular life scientist looking for new challenges. Anne's sharp and studious mind combined with broad social skills allowed her to face these challenges and to grow from testing to test automation engineer. With 5 years of experience in IT, she currently works at PGGM, a service provider for pension funds, where she not only tests, but also brings business and IT together.

 

17. Anne Mette Hass (Denmark)

@AnnaMetteHass
Anne Mette is a consultant with a focus on testing and processes. She speaks in conferences regularly, and has been going to EuroSTAR for 20 years and she’s worked in this industry for over 30 years. Her interests in testing are wide from technical aspects to human aspects and she is known for her work with standards.

 

18. Ariane Izac (Brazil)
@arianizac

Ariane works with test automation. Her experience includes functional testing through REST APIs and other interfaces, as well as performance testing. She’s passionate about software testing, is a frequent speaker in Brazil and has published articles. She runs a popular LinkedIn group in Portuguese Diario de Uma Paixao.

 

19. Anoush Najarian (USA)
@anoushnajarian

Anoush is a software engineering manager at MathWorks. She is passionate about building things and business development, and creating software tools with great performance and scalability. In her spare time she builds maker toys: robots, circuits, 3D printing and VR.

 

20. Bernice Niel Ruhland (USA)
@bruhland2000

Bernice is Director of Quality Management Programs at ValueCentric, and long-term industry contributor. She loves anything that pertains to testing, quality and the tech field. She started as programmer/analyst and grew into a liaison between the tech and business world. Her specialty is test strategy and exploratory testing with a career focus on data accuracy.

 

21. Beth Halstead (USA)
Beth is a Software QA Engineer who considers delighting customers her top priority. She performs functional, usability and performance testing on products, and automates tests.

 

22. Bettina Stühle (Germany)
@BStuhle

Bettina is a software tester with very hands-on and down-to-earth attitude. She is open minded and caring. People around her feel safe and welcome. Bettina is a great listener and keen observer. The amazing aspect is that she has positive perspective on situations around and  the drive to improve the situation for coworkers and clients.

 

23. Blanca Moreno (Mexico)

@BlancaJMoreno

Blanca is a Computer Systems Engineer with more than 12 years of experience in the area of IT. She works as Software Quality Engineer at Oracle MDC. Co-founder of Exceptional QA, a network of freelancers and business consultancy dedicated to software testing. Coordinator of QA Minds Community, a network of professionals and specialists in testing in Mexico who meet every month to discuss experiences and share knowledge in Software Testing and QA area. Chair in WIE (Women Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and she is also an executive committee member of Technovation Challenge Mexico, a program that inspires girls and young to solve problems in their community through mobile applications to become the next generation of changemakers by doing social impact in their communities.

 

24. Branka Rakic (Serbia)
@branka_rakic

Branka is a test architect, working to increase testing awareness and advising on good practices. She has been working on designing the architecture of the Levi9 test automation framework. She is also an international speaker, sharing her lessons outside her own company and following the testing trends like IoT testing.

 

25. Carin Eaton (South Africa)
@Caz_Eaton

Carin recently transitioned from a QA Manual Tester to a QA Automation Engineer and is based in Cape Town, South Africa. She enjoys taking part in community events, learning from others and is always looking for a better way. Carin was part of the winning team for the Africa round of the very first Software Testing World Cup and has also found herself speaking on stage at the Agile Testing Days 2016 conference in Germany.

 

26. Carolina Vivet (Argentina)

@testerdelsur
Carolina works as software tester at Trivago. She comes to this list highly recommended, with a tip that we might be losing out not knowing her better.

 

27. Claudia Badell (Uruguay)
@claubs_uy

Claudia is an agile enthusiast with a strong background in software testing. She is passionate about building and fostering a whole-team approach towards testing and quality. She works as a Senior Quality Engineer and she is an international conference speaker. Claudia co-organises meetups and TestingUy conference. She has implemented testing processes for several teams, and trained them in test automation. Claudia also taught testing and programming courses in the CS Department within the School of Engineering at Universidad de la República for 7 years. She has recently started writing a blog in Spanish about testing and agile.

 

28. Constance Armitage (UK)
@constancehermit

Constance is a tester known for her art. After showing up at a TestBash to learn on testing, community learned of her and now she creates comics in collaboration with Ministry of Testing.

 

29. Dana Aonofriesei (Denmark)
@DanaAONO

Dana is Head of Product Quality at Trustpilot. She’s worked on web-based projects with agile methodologies, and shared her experiences in conferences.

 

30. Darya Manukhina (Russia)

@ManukhinaDarya
Darya is a tester with a PhD, and an avid mindmapper. She shares mindmaps on XMind share site and has already gotten started as a conference speaker.

 

31. Dawn Test Code (USA)
@dckismet

Dawn is a tester by profession and name. The story of the name and its implications is fascinating, and you should find her to talk about it. She’s an accomplished author of articles related to testing and software development. She speaks regularly at conferences, and has a blog at http://dawntestcode.github.io

 

32. Deepika Loganathan (Australia)
@dloganathan85

Deepika works with Tyro Payments, and working with great results in the realm of testing, she now holds a position in Product Management as a Senior Business Analyst. With years of experience in contracting as well as product organizations, she delivers great results.

 

33. Denali Lumma (USA)
@denalilumma

Denali is Senior Engineering Manager at Uber, and delivered a great keynote recently at Selenium Conference Austin on quality engineering practices. Engineering and team excellence is her thing, and she’s an experienced leader in the area, sharing actively.

 

34. Diana Larsen (USA)
@DianaOfPortland

Diana is a consultant, best known for her two books: Agile Retrospectives with Esther Derby, and Liftoff: Launching Agile Teams & Projects with Ainsley Nies. She developed the Agile Fluency Model ™ with James Shore, which incorporates testing and quality. She is an awesome facilitator and popular conference speaker. She has long experience with helping teams build quality in and understands testing, and often participates in testing conferences, so that we can feel ownership on her awesomeness on a list of testers too. She appears to be currently testing people’s perceptions, if not software. Find her blog here: https://www.futureworksconsulting.com/blog/

 

35. Diana Wendruff (USA)
@ducksnsquirrels

Diana is an inquisitive tester, holding a QA Lead position at Loop Returns. She has been taking steps on her speaking career, sharing her lessons learned for the rest of us.

 

36. Dianë Xhymshiti (Germany)
@dxhymshiti

Dianë is a young and enthusiastic tester talent with a passion for quality. She’s a critical thinker with great communication skills, highly organized, has a great eye for detail while always keeping the big picture in mind. Dianë is really living the whole-team approach, not only by ensuring close collaboration within her agile team, but also by coaching her teammates in exploratory testing, driving automation efforts, as well as developing product improvements herself. Being one of the moderators of her company’s testing community, Dianë is actively fostering knowledge sharing between everyone interested in testing. She currently resides in Germany but is originally from Kosovo.

 

37. Dolly Pente (Romania)
Dolly is tester, working for Altom Consulting. She gets to test for different customers, and to work with curious people like her as her colleagues. She is not afraid to do what is needed to be at conferences, and she’s been in winning competition groups as well as representing the Test Lab, teaching everyone testing. Dolly writes on the Altom blog at http://altom.ro/blog/author/dolly

 

38. Eeva Pursula (Finland)
@EevaPursula

Eeva works as the lone testing specialist amongst developers creating a product. Her background as a physicist is useful in testing, observing different kind of phenomenon with software. Tester work with all of its possibilities in helping improve the ways we work still continues to fascinate her. She blogs at http://savutesti.blogspot.fi

 

39. Elena Beres (Romania)
Elena is a QA engineer with Fortech. She tests, works with agile teams, writes documentation. She’s been testing both desktop and mobile applications, and contributed to projects relevant feedback on quality.

 

40. Elena Kolpakova (Germany)
Elena is a senior QA Analyst at AKQA. She tests, and she coaches. And she holds groups of testers together.
 

41. Elmira Atanassova (Bulgaria)
@AtElmira

Elmira is Senior Quality Assurance Engineer with Microfocus. Elmira puts together her skills as a tester and as a scrum master, helping create better software.

 

42. Erica Walker (USA)
@ExactlyErica

Erica is a technical evangelist at SalesForce, growing into a more technical role over time and changing titles from testing to reflect her wider set of skills. Erica shares her lessons both internally, in the SalesForce community and Testing Community. To see her in action, find her talk from CAST.

 

43. Franziska Sauerwein (Switzerland)
@singsalad

Franzi is a software crafter, who crafts their tests with just as much love and care as any other software. They are a conference speaker, and co-organizer of European Testing Conference. They knows their way around unit testing, and recently shared their lessons on working with testers in a webinar. Franziska resides now in Switzerland, before that in London and originates from Germany.

 

44. Gabriela Rial (Uruguay)

Gabriela is a software engineer who believes quality is everyone’s responsibility. She works as SQA Manager at K2B, one of the biggest uruguayan software development companies. She volunteers with non-profit organizations to teach testing to young girls. She is a regular speaker in technical conferences in Uruguay. Gabriela is always researching new methodologies and strategies to help improve her team.

 

45. Gerie Owen (USA)
@gerieowen

Gerie is a Software Test Manager at QualiTest Group. She’s a frequent and popular speaker in conferences on quality and testing topics, and a prolific writer. Her track record shows good results on technical testing support for large, distributed organizations running complex projects involving multiple applications.

 

46. Gitte Klitgaard (Denmark)
@nativewired

Gitte has worked as a tester before, and now improves the state of everything as an independent agile coach. She is strongly rooted in various communities, including hanging out with testers. You could think of her an example of how you may leave testing, but testing never really leaves you.

 

47. Hannah Rauschel (Germany)
Hannah is a programmer and as we all know, the great programmers are also testers. Another core skill of testing in Hannah is that she hangs out with testers, treating testers as peers they are, enabling cross-pollinating ideas and making software more awesome.

 

48. Ioana Serban (UK)
@IoanaSaysGo

Ioana is senior test engineer, and a fan of automation and common sense. Most of her test experience is working with web applications, with trips to look into detail of mobile and performance testing, and most recently operations. You can find her speaking at conferences every now and then. Ioana blogs at https://medium.com/@ioanasaysgo

 

49. Iren Babiak (Latvia/Ukraine)

Iren is very passionate about testing. Ever since she became a mother she dived into the world of testing without hesitation and her drive to learn, practice and learn more has never stopped. She loves to engage in discussion about testing. She as equally great as team lead and hands on tester.

 

50. Iris Pinkster (Netherlands)
@PinksterIris

Iris is a testing professional who authors books, talks in conferences and gets invited to run program committee for EuroSTAR17. She currently works for ABM Amro Bank as a Test Manager.

 

51. Iveta Zālīte (Latvia)

Iveta brings impressive amount if experience to her day to day job she enjoys. She has learned that good communication is the key for the team to perform well and deliver what they aspired for. No matter what project she is in, she will be proactive and keen to learn.

 

52. Jain Waldrip (USA)
Jain is a QA tester at USA Football. She works with manual and automated regression testing and sign-off procedures for a development stack primarily focused on NodeJS and React applications.

 

53. Jane Mareth (USA)
@janemarette

Jane works at Microsoft, with test automation being a something she does so that the smart automation conferences have already found her as a speaker and panelist. In her spare time, she teaches programming to people who come to the industry from non-CS backgrounds yet wanting to learn code.

 

54. Jasmine Vyas (the Netherlands)
@geeky_jazzy
Jasmine holds a QA Engineer position with Ginger payments, and is an awesome exploratory tester and a
bubbly personality. She identifies with being a nerd, and has her heart set on languages, Star Wars and technology. She blogs at https://www.gingerpayments.com/blog/
 

55. Jay Philips (USA)

@jayphilips
Jay is CEO & President at Project Realms & TeamQualityPro. Building an extensive career on helping people with the whole of software development, she is an entrepreneur with a testing background.

 

56. Jenna Charlton (USA)
@SheWrestlesTest

Jenna works with testing and is particularly passionate about technical testing. She enjoys API and web services testing, as well as mentoring other testers. We could follow her conference premier recently and hope to learn more from her.

 

57. Jennie Naylor (Australia)
@naylor_j

Jennie is Director and Lead Consultant for Izinga Solutions. She is known as a great test manager who knows what she’s doing. As a leader, she coaches on quality, and makes an impact on software development productivity.

 

58. Jessica Versaw (USA)
@jraeversaw

Jessica works as Software Quality Assurance Analyst at Hudl, and meeting her leaves a positive memory. She is bright and enthusiastic, wonderful to talk with, and a great tester. In her work, she utilizes exploratory and automated testing, and work across technical layers. She blogs at http://jessica.versaw.com

 

59. Johanna Rothman (USA)

@JohannaRothman
Primarily known as a pragmatic management consultant, trainer/workshop leader, popular conference speaker and author of many books related to software development, agile, and hiring, Johanna helps people learn how to build quality into their product. Her books are helpful to testing professionals even if their main topic isn’t testing. She is a frequent speaker at testing conferences. She has devoted much time to helping to organize conferences as a program and track chair. Besides the many books she has published for software professionals, she also writes fiction! Her blogs can be found at https://www.jrothman.com/blogs/.

 

60. Joss Åkerson (Sweden)

Joss is an exploratory, context-driven, tester and test team supervisor with a background in tech support. She has a degree in communication and media and is always happy to share her ideas as well as learn from others. Joss is an extremely creative person working with a variety of things such as poetry slam, word puns, clothes design (Aki Aki is the name of her own brand) and last but not least she is a kick-ass drummer!

 

61. Juliana Herbert (Brazil)

Juliana works as a Senior Consultant on processes management, software validation and verification, and software development processes. She has a PhD and Master in Computer Science degree, with focus on Software Validation and Verification. She also is an Adjunct Professor at Universidade Federal das Ciências da Saúde de Porto Alegre and an international speaker. She is an Official ISTQB Courses Instructor. She is a Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Professional. She holds PMP, PMI-ACP and PMI-SP certifications.

 

62. Kadri-Annagret Petersen (Sweden)
Kadri-Annagret works as Tester at Magine TV. She is a thoughtful and thorough professional who steadily keeps teams on track to high quality products by setting high standards, and showing how to get there by example. When not asking question and learning as a tester, she is contributing to Nordic Testing Days conference.

 

63. Kamila Mrozek (Poland)
@MrozekKamila

Kamila is Polish testing power person, with international talks and a keynote in her resume. She identifies as a critical thinker and optimist, and a quality engineer. She blogs at http://dragonqa.blog

 

64. Kasia Morawska (Poland)
Kasia works as senior test manager at Volvo. A professional software tester and great colleague, who knows her way around testing.

 

65. Kate Paulk (USA)
@katepaulk

Kate is a prolific writer and writes with Ministry of Testing. She’s recently started speaking in conferences and is now known for her thoughtfulness in the area of security testing. While she now greets us from USA, she is originally Australian. She blogs at http://www.katepaulk.com
 

66. Katja Obring (UK)
Katja works with web and mobile application testing with a strategic focus, knowing how to build a relevant coverage based risk assessment. She incorporates UI/UX in her work, and knows how to integrate manual testers and agile teams.

 

67. Kirstin Kerr (UK)
@thefluffytester

Kirstin works as Test Analyst with NSH Education for Scotland. She hides herself in the public eye, but her positive reputation gets other people around her to make sure she is included. Her twitter tagline is delightful: she tests software for fluffiness, but reminds us that it does not define her.

 

68. Kirsty Selkirk (UK)
@KirstySelkirk

Kirsty works as Lead Test Analyst at ACCA. With 12 years in the role, she retains her passion for software testing. She works closely with developers, tech support and business representatives in agile development, taking scrum master role in addition to all sorts of testing activities. She delights in adopting exploratory testing and creating approaches that are context-driven and risk-based.

 

69. Kristīne Corbus (Germany)
@e_tester

Kristīne is one of those people who are hard to place geographically, as she resides in Germany but is originally from Latvia. She is just all around awesome. We know her best as the power behind the first TestBash in Germany and as a meetup organizer bringing people together. When you ever met her you’ll know that she doesn’t only have strong testing knowledge, but is also really supportive in any way!

 

70. Krithika Swaminathan (USA)
Krithika is Vice President, Software and Quality at Intuit. She is a proven leader, introducing quality across the board. She also speaks at conferences, in particular as a keynote speaker.

 

71. Lena Wiberg (Sweden)
@LenaPejgan

Lena is a former programmer (~12 years) who moved into testing full-time around 2010. She’s been working as tester, test lead, test manager and test strategist at a number of companies and currently she’s team manager of QA at AFA försäkring (insurance). She’s a speaker too, both locally and internationally, and last but not least she takes active part in the software tester education in Sweden by being the Chairman of the Managing Board at one of the country’s vocational universities.

 

72. Leticia Almeida (Uruguay)

@lalmeida88

Leticia has a Computer Engineer degree and works as Performance Engineer at Abstracta, leading challenging projects for US companies. She writes for different blogs and has spoken in meetups and local conferences about performance testing and systems optimization.

 

73. Lilit Sharkhatunyan (Armenia)
@lilitshark

Lilit work as Senior QA Engineer at Workfront. Her strong analytical and problem-solving skills and ability to manage and prioritize multiple critical tasks comes in handy when she’s working in testing projects. She is active in organizing events on testing, and well on getting started with public speaking herself.

 

74. Lisandra Armas (Cuba)

@lisyarmas

Lisandra resides in Uruguay and works as a Mobile UX & Accessibility Expert at Abstracta. She publishes articles about software testing and website accessibility, as well as presenting at meetups and local conferences. She graduated from the Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas in Cuba.

 

75. Madhuri Mittal (India)
@Madhuri_QA

Madhuri is a QA professional, who loves open source enough to volunteer with Mozilla Firefox. She started off with manual, and has added automation into the mix of her skills. She’s particularly excited about apps when they fail, a trait that is very useful in the tester profession.

 

76. Maija Kvedere (Latvia)

@maijakv

Maija is a curious tester who grew into the role. She always has enjoyed the learning aspects in testing. Her current challenge is studies in university while working as a tester.

 

77. Marcela Mellado (Chile)
@mmellado79

Marcela works a Senior Quality Engineer and has more than 10 years of experience leading teams. She organizes Testing en Chile conference www.testingenchile.cl.

 

78. Margaret Dineen (Ireland)
Margaret works for a startup. With 26 years testing software and experience of living in both Australia and Ireland, she is a telecom sector expert but worked for different kinds of projects. She still waits for the day she gets tired of testing but until then, she might even share stories of failure knowing that we’ve all faced them.

 

 

79. María Clara Choucair (Colombia)

@MariaChoucair

María Clara founded Choucair Testing, one of the biggest testing companies in Latin America with branches in Colombia, Panamá and Peru (+600 employees). She is the President at Hispanic America Software Testing Qualifications Board (HASTQB). She has a Systems Engineer degree with specialization in Finance.

 

80. María Eugenia Decia (Uruguay)

María Eugenia has a Computer Engineer degree. She works as a Software Test Engineer (+11 years) and from the beginning of her career she has always been passionate about software testing. She has trained different team members and has nourished in her team a culture to work in conjunction with the development team, finding methodologies and tools that help improve the quality of the product together. She speaks regularly at GeneXus conference.

 

81. Maria Kispal (Hungary)
@tuskohopkins3

Maria works as senior QA engineer at Liferay. She knows how to test when thinking is required, and knowing how well software works beyond shallow verifications are needed. She is a co-organizer of PalinQA meetup in Budapest.


82. Mariana Travieso (Uruguay)
Mariana has a Computer Engineer degree and works as a Consultant, managing testing projects. She was involved in the design and the implementation of the Centro de Ensayos de Software’s Testing Training Career, the first full-online Testing Career in Spanish (3 years in its complete version). Nowadays, she manages and teaches some of its courses. She is passionate about testing, and loves teaching, in particular on how to generate testing ideas from models that represent reality.

 

83. Marijke Van Imschoot (Belgium)
@Marijke_VI

Marijke works as a test coach with 10 years in testing. Since the beginning, she has been fascinated with the industry and exploring to learn more as she goes.

 

84. Marine Serré (France)

@whatifMarine
Marine tests complex system that has hardware, firmware and software components. She is an agile enthusiast, strong in her analytical skills and comes to testing with a programmer background. Automation is a natural part of the work she contributes, python/django being her keywords there.

 

85. Marit van Dijk (the Netherlands)
@MaritVanDijk77

Marit is a programmer and a test automation expert with a particular soft spot for open source software. Java, Selenium and Cucumber get mentioned frequently with things she works with, enthusiastic to learn more.

 

86. Mary Ding (China)
Mary is an amazing leading and testing practitioner with an emphasis on mobile development. She’s been in the testing field for around 8 years, and including 4 years of team management. Her experience has been in API automation tests, performance, test framework set up and mobile app tests.She’s passionate about talking with other people and learning from each other. In her spare time, Mary enjoys travelling, music and plays a Chinese traditional instrument – GuZheng. Some of her publications include: Formal Approaches to Deadlock Analysis in Competitions of Shared Web Resources (EI index); and Formal Analyses and Verifications of Deadlock Prevention Solutions in the Web Environment (EI index).

 

87. Mary Thorn (USA)
@MaryHThorn

Mary is a director of agile practices at Ipreo and an agile and testing coach. Among her many publications, she is the “chief storyteller” of Three Pillars of Agile Testing and Quality. She frequently keynotes and conducts workshops on agile testing at conferences. Mary has a broad agile and testing background that spans automation, data warehouses, and web-based systems in a wide variety of technologies and testing techniques, in multiple domains.

 


88. Melissa Pontes (Brazil)
@melissabpontes

Melissa has been a heuristic-based question asker for over a decade, and a 2014 Agile Testing Days Software Testing World Cup champion. She teaches and inspires others to learn, and is always learning herself. She has her share of publications for a global audience and does not limit her writing to professional topics but also short stories.

 

89. Melissa Tondi (USA)
@melissatondi

With decades in the industry and last 10 in management, Melissa is a leader and practitioner of Management by Collaboration. You can run into her in various conferences as a speaker who shares her lessons.

 

90. Merridy Marshall (New Zealand)
@MerridyMarshall

Merridy is a Principal Consultant at Assurity Consulting. She specializes in Test Management and Consultancy, Test Analysis and Business Analysis. With a long history in test management, she knows her way around different kinds of projects.
 

 

91. Miroslava Nikolova (Bulgaria)
@Mirolitka

Miro is a managing tester with a drive to excel at her work and learn. She volunteers at conferences, listens carefully and speaks up her mind. She has a few public presentation in her bag by now, and we will see a lot more of her. She works as a QA chapter lead at Object Systems International. Her interests in addition to management include keeping a keen eye on automation, and amongst the many things she is she is a certified Java programmer.

 

92. Mónica Wodzislawski (Uruguay)
Mónica is an international Consultant in Software Quality and Testing with more than twenty-five years of experience in IT. As a software testing pioneer in Uruguay, she has contributed to build a large environment for software testing, both, in industry and academia, with the motto: "test to learn and learn to test". She is responsible for the first full-online Testing Career (3 years in its complete version) in Spanish offered by the Centro de Ensayos de Software. Mónica has been a speaker in several international conferences, and she is also a professor of Software Engineering in the CS Department within the School of Engineering at Universidad de la República.

 

93. Nadia Soledad Cavalleri (Argentina)
@NadiaCavalleri

Nadia is an information systems engineer with experience in many types of testing, and also an experienced clinical psychologist and professor. She’s served as a judge for the Software Testing World Cup in 2014 and 2016, and co-organises the ArgenTesting conference. She publishes articles, provides software testing training courses, and speaks at international testing conferences. She has a YouTube channel in Spanish about testing at https://www.youtube.com/c/NadiaSoledadCavalleri.

 

94. Natalya Rukol (Russia)
@NatalyaRukol

Natalya is Evangelist at Quality Lab, working on test management and training. She is bright and talented, and helps people deliver better conference presentations. Needless to say, her help comes from a place of expertise in public speaking.

 

95. Nuwangi Kiriwathuduwa (Sri Lanka)
Nuwangi is a test automation specialist. She’s tried out a selection of tools, and recently written about Robot Framework mirroring her experiences with other tools. She works on the whole chain of figuring out what exactly are we building, and how we can test that using automation.

 

96. Oana Casapu (Romania)
Oana is a managing partner at Altom Consulting. She excels at managing projects that include testing. Her problem-solving abilities and customer-orientedness make her an excellent person to run with her dream: forming a group of software test specialists.

 

97. Patrícia Gonçalves (Brazil)

@patiaragon
Patrícia is a professional software tester and agilist, highly involved in both the agile and software testing communities in Brazil. She writes columns for “O Mundo dos Testes”, a Brazilian testing magazine and blogs at https://patiaragon.wordpress.com.

 

98. Pooja Shah (India)
@TechGirlPooja

Pooja is automation lead at MoEngage and a general test automation specialist and an international speaker. She’s an open source enthusiast and loves helping teams bridge the gap between engineering and QA.

 

99. Raluca Dudila (Romania)
@scouting_magpie

Raluca works as a Software Developer in Test at UMT, where she leads automation efforts with a mixture of Web UI and API tests. She sets up the process in which they work in, teaches her colleagues in how to do tests and makes sure that they use good practices in keeping they automation valuable.
 

100. Ramya Ramalinga Moorthy (India)
Ramya provides technical consulting in performance testing and engineering area for various business domains. Performance, scalability, high availability and capacity are her focuses. She’s published many articles and presented at various conferences in her domain of expertise.
 


101. Rebecca Clinard (USA)

@webappperf
Rebecca is an expert in the world of web application performance. With couple of decades of experience, she’s been through a variety of tools and nowadays holds a position of Customer Success Manager at CA Technologies.

 

102. Renata Čičman (Lithuania)

@renatacicman

Renata is a great example for the “Once a tester, always a tester”. She is keen on learning from testers and communities around her. Her latest title in the innovation hub might not sound as a testing role, yet she is helping her team to make the right thing in the right way.

 


103. Rosa Acri (Germany)
@Mmallow91

Rosa found her way to agile tester through tech support. She lives in Germany, with Italian roots and significant time spent in Switzerland. She blogs at http://buchgeschnipsel.wordpress.com   

 

104. Sabina Simons (Canada)
@sabina_s_simons

Sabina is a Senior Test Strategist working at D2L Corporation and the Secretary on the board for the Kitchener Waterloo Software Quality Association (KWSQA). Questioning approaches to improve them and seeing things holistically are her key assets.

 

105. Sarah Pimentel Abrantes (Germany)
@sarahpimentel

Sarah works as Head of Quality for GoEuro. Starting as a tester, she quickly took increasing responsibilities and now leads the quality efforts. On the side of her industry job, she also is a professor teaching quality topics. She blogs at https://medium.com/@sarahpimentel

 

106. Sara Ogasawara (Japan)
Sara manages teams in Tokyo and Manila. She started out as an exploratory tester for mobile and web. She’s now passionate about guiding her teams to develop the skills and confidence to become great testers. When she is not testing, you will find her making beautiful wagashi (Japanese confectioneries).

 

 

107. Sigrid Mäe (Sweden)
Sigrid is an agile tester and test automation developer with about a decade of experience. She is wonderful, modest and really smart.
 

108. Silvia Nane (Uruguay)

Silvia is an experience Software Quality Specialist with more than fifteen years of experience. Currently she works as an indepent Consultant helping teams to design and implement quality process in different contexts. She is a trainer for different TMMI, ISTQB and ISQI certifications.
 

109. Sinduja Kumar (UK)
@SinduKumar81

Sinduja works as Principal Development Tester and Line Manager at SAS. Her specialty is with server side software. With over 12 years in the industry, she knows her way around both manual and automated testing, as well as managing projects and people.

 

110. Sofía Palamarchuk (Uruguay)
@sopalamarchuk

Sofia is a brave entrepreneur, moved to Silicon Valley as the CEO of Abstracta. Offering offshore testing services she promotes and spreads testing activities. She has spoken in international testing conferences about quality engineering, continuous testing and DevOps. She writes frequently for different blogs.
 

111. Soile Sainio (Finland)
@Soikkis

Soile works as an agile coach at Nordea Life, and is a forever tester at heart. Whenever there’s work for the tester’s community in Finland, you can always find her there.

 

112. Soumya  Sriram (USA)
Soumya work for Ellation as Director of Engineering, Test. She manages a global team, and one of the ways she supports her team is by setting up a new testing conference in Moldova. Her work covers all managerial sides of testing from planning and allocations to execution, and she knows her way around both the manual and the automation side of testing.

 

113. Stéphanie Desby (France)
@StephDesby

Stéphanie holds a position of a QA Tester who loves tech and innovations. She’s found her way from developer to testing taking a step with UTest, and now contributing as a full team member seeing things differently - like a tester. She blogs at https://parlonstest.wordpress.com

 

114. Stephanie Frias (Peru)

@la__steph

Stephanie has a Software Engineer degree. She is an Agile enthusiast and co-founded WiT Peru. She co-organizes Hablemos de Testing meetup in Lima-Perú and blogs about testing and programing at https://medium.com/@la__steph. Stephanie works as Software QA Engineer and has experience in automation.

 

115. Susan van de Ven (the Netherlands)
@susan_vdven

Susan is Delivery Lead at Marktplaats. She works with the world of mobile, knowing both the domain and the test automation tools of the area. She blogs at https://susanvandevenblog.wordpress.com/

 

116. Tanya Kravtsov (USA)
@DevOpsQA

Tanya works as QA Director at Audible. She often shares lessons on DevOps in various international conferences as a DevOps and Automation Guru.

 

117. Theresa Neate (Australia)
@TheresaNeate

Theresa is a career tester and test consultant who loves lean and agile, and advocates for holistic system quality and systems thinking. Last 10 years of her two decades of experience was spent on consulting through different companies. She blogs for TechTarget DevOpsAgenda and co-organises and contributes at DevOps Girls.

 

118. Tracey Baxter (UK)
@tbaxter78

Tracey is Test, Quality and Agile Lead at NHS Education for Scotland. In addition to being an enthusiastic test specialist, she has a superpower: she recognizes good people around her, across company borders and speaks up to promote them. She is passionate about sharing knowledge - taking back to her team the skills or tricks that she learns at conferences, workshops and peer events. An enthusiastic member of the test community who is now co-organiser of Software Testing Clinic Glasgow.

 

119.Trisha Chetani (Singapore)
@trisha_1212

Trisha calls herself an amateur software tester, but has five years of experience with automation for mobile and web, and testing manually. Trisha is a tester who takes her research seriously. Some of us have come to know her for boldly asking questions that help her acquire more and more expert information, and seeking to improve her ways of working.

 

120. Tuula Pääkkönen (Finland)
@TuulaP

Tuula is a software testing enthusiast and all-roles specialist with the Finnish National Library. She speaks regularly at conferences and has a strong online presence. Tuula is deeply interested in how systems and people work, and loves geeking out on a little (a lot) programming.

 

121. Úrsula Bartram (Uruguay)

Ursula has a Computer Engineer degree and eight years of experience in software testing. With a strong background in automation, she manages the testing team of GeneXus, an intelligent tool that creates and maintains software automatically. She evangelizes and promotes automation as the core of her team testing strategy. She is also in charge of coordinating the releases of the product and adopting a continuous delivery pipeline with focus on quality. Ursula volunteers with non-profit organizations to teach testing and how to work in the IT area.

 

122. Urszula Karzelek (Poland)
Urszula works with testing at Opera in Poland with an automation emphasis. She has automated tests on various tools, and maintains curiosity to learn more about testing.

 

123. Vaishali Thakkar (India)
@kernel_girl

Vaishali works as a developer on Linux kernel, and knows her way around the multifaceted processes and tools that Linux developers share to check the changes they are introducing. She knows that testing is central to kernel developers, and volunteers to share it.

 

124. Varuna Srivastava (India)
@vibranttester

Varuna is a technical tester and test automator working with Thoughtworks. In addition to using a variety of tools in her work, she also helps teams build up their practices around quality.

 

125. Vera Gehlen-Baum (Germany)
@VeraGeBa

Vera knows how to turn good testers into great ones, and is a great one herself. With an academic title of a Dr, she knows her way around how people learn. She is one of the powers behind TestBash Germany. Her passion is to help other learn and continuously improve.

 

 

 

 


 

About Maaret Pyhäjärvi

Maaret

Maaret Pyhäjärvi is a software professional with testing emphasis. She identifies as an empirical technologist, a tester and a programmer, a catalyst for improvement and a speaker. Her day job is working with a software product development team as a hands-on testing specialist. On the side, she teaches exploratory testing and makes a point of adding new, relevant feedback for test-automation heavy projects through skilled exploratory testing. In addition to being a tester and a teacher, she is a serial volunteer for different non-profits driving forward the state of software development. She blogs regularly at http://visible-quality.blogspot.fi and is the author of Mob Programming Guidebook.