Panel Discussions - STeP-IN SUMMIT 2020

Panel Discussions: Bang For The Bug: Economics Of Quality In The Digital Age

With rapid developments in technology, demand for time-to-market becoming norm, companies have embarked on disruptive innovations, cost effective ways to make product releases through organization transformations, adopting to cutting edge and open source technologies and finally process innovations for imbibing “Extreme Ownership” mindset. Given these significant shifts in the last few years, the testing fraternity equally needs to adapt its role, skill set, tools and technologies to stay relevant in this competitive market and provide continued value proposition. Our panelists as practitioners, organization leaders will provide their insights and perspectives into the dynamic shifts (people, process, technology) in the industry and readiness of the testing fraternity to cope with such changes.

Panel Profiles:

Sudhir Patnaik

Vice President, Engineering and Site Leader

Gibraltar India Development Center

Sudhir has 25+ years of experience in software engineering and since march 2019, working as VP Engineering and Site Lead at Gibraltar India Development Centre(A Prudential Financial Insurance Inc. USA Company). Prior to Gibraltar India, he was the VP of Platform Engineering and Operations and Head – IDC Site Strategy and Operations, at Intuit India Product Development Centre, for 12+ years. Sudhir held engineering leadership roles at Accelrys Inc. – Bangalore R&D Centre of Excellence (now Dassault) and Misys Healthcare India Development Centre. He holds Master degree in Electronics and Communication from NIT, Rourkela and active in academia partnerships. Sudhir is a member of Industry Advisory Board at IIIT, Bangalore and member of the Board of Studies for Computer Science at VIT, Andhra Pradesh. He is also member of IEEE, CSI, ACM and ISTE and fellow at Institution of Engineers (India). Sudhir was the past president of STeP-IN from 2012-14 and has presented in conferences such as QAI, SEI and STeP-IN and has published articles on software testing in CIOL, Stickyminds etc. He is actively involved in many technology and leadership forums in India. He is currently pursuing Ph.D. in Computer Science (Machine Learning) from M.S.Ramaiah University of Applied Science, Bangalore since April,2018.

Brijesh Deb

Senior Test Consultant - High Tech

Sogeti, Netherlands

Brijesh Deb has over 2 decades years of experience of leading, managing and coaching teams on Software Testing and embracing the Agile mindset. He is a Bachelor of Engineering – Electronics and Communication and a Master of Business Administration in Operations.

Being a hands on software tester has also helped him stay close to technology and understand the intricacies. He has been involved in testing of applications from lightweight mobile apps to the large scale industrial IoT solutions. He works with some of the top most high tech companies providing everyday solutions in the Automotive, Avionics, Semiconductor, Space, Agriculture and Energy sectors to name a few.

Brijesh is an Agile Transformation Agent with the objective of helping organizations in achieving customer excellence with a focus on delivering maximum value to customers, stakeholders and teams. Emphasis on cultural change driven by collaboration at all levels to adapt the agile mindset and change.

He lives in the Netherlands with his wife and 2 years old son. In his free time, he loves singing rhymes with his son. He’s a wordsmith and loves to write on social media especially LinkedIn. He has a passion for anthropology and loves to study human behavior and aspires to be a TV show host.

Smitha Mave

Director, Engineering

Athenahealth

Smitha Mave is currently Director, Engineering with athenahealth, Bangalore building next generation cloud-based healthcare systems. As an engineering leader, balancing delivery excellence with technical craftsmanship has been her focus area.

She has over 19 years of industry experience in software development and management in various companies ranging from startups to medium and large sized companies – Tivo, EMC, RSA, McAfee to name a few. She has been part of product development teams as a developer and engineering leader in multiple domains including Security, Storage, Virtualization, Cloud infrastructure, Cloud Platform, API and Application Development for Entertainment and Media and Healthcare.

Smitha is passionate about building high performance teams and driving innovation. She has multiple patent disclosures, publications and granted patents. She is a keen learner, interested in technology and people development.

Smitha has a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering and an executive MBA from IIMB. She is a regular speaker in technical forums. She has also been part of the leadership team of Grace Hopper Conference, the largest technology conference for women.

Vipul Kocher

President of Indian Testing Board (ISTQB), Soul of testAIng.com (tAI) & CEO, Verity Software

Vipul Kocher is an ex-Adobe engineer and IIT alumnus with a 25-year experience in Software Development and Testing industry. Besides being the creator of AiU – the world’s first AI testing certification, DoU – DevOps united and others, Vipul is also President of the Indian Testing – ISTQB Board, Convener of STeP-IN forum and National Convener of Indic Academy, to name a few.

He is the founder of TestAIng – world’s first AI focused testing services company and Verity software – a training company. Vipul co-founded and ran PureTesting, a hugely successful and recognized testing services company from 2004 to 2012 and sold it to start SALT (School of Applied Learning in Testing) – a skill assessment and upskilling company.

Vipul’s testing experience involves all phases of testing, performing manual as well as automated tests, writing unit and integration testing harnesses, writing performance testing tools as well as performance test execution.

He was one of the first accredited TMMi Assessor. He has led and participated in many test process consulting assignments both, formal (TMMi) and informal.

He has won several awards including the best paper award at STAREast 2006 and the Logica CMG Triple Star Award for the most original contribution at EuroStar 2005. He has been a Keynote speaker at many testing conferences worldwide.

Vipul invented Q-Patterns, a method of capturing testing knowledge and writing reusable test cases. This method is being used by various organizations across the world. He is also the inventor of Linguistic Analysis technique for identification of large number of tests from minimal documentation in shortest time possible.

Jayapradeep Jiothis

Chief Operating Officer

Verity Software

Jayapradeep Jiothis is the Chief Operating Officer of Verity Software. He is a Professional IT Technocrat with more than 20 years of experience in Product Management, IT Governance, Pre Sales and Software Quality Assurance for software services and product development. Having Extensive experience in managing teams and delivering projects on time and within budget, JP has Full Lifecycle Experience in Software Development including Requirements Analysis, Business Analysis, Test process definition, Environment management, Delivery, Automation.

JP has been Extensive experience in building and managing Offshore Centers and Test Factories for customers.

He is also the coauthor of “Software Testing Guide Book. JP has Proven experience in transitioning projects in Agile development environments.

JP has Architected solutions and managed projects on complex technologies using Python, Ruby, Mongo DB, Hadoop, Vertica, LAMP et.c

JP has handled End to end Delivery and Innovation for 2 successful market products .

With a constant passion for learning JP has acquired the following certifications, ISTQB CTFL, ISTQB – Advanced – TM, ISTQB – Advanced – TA, ISTQB – Agile extension, Prince 2 Practioner, Certified Agile Tester & Accredited Trainer- ISQI, DSA™ Design Sprint Master 2.0″.