2022

Declan O’Riordan

Head of IA, Cabinet Office, United Kingdom

Declan O’Riordan is currently acting Head of Information Assurance (IA) for Government Digital Services, a part of the UK Cabinet Office. In 2014, he won the EuroSTAR prize for best conference paper and his debut talk was voted the ‘do over’ session. In 2015 Declan won the best conference paper prize at STAREAST, and was on the EuroSTAR programme committee. In 2016 he was a joint EuroSTAR best paper prize winner (with Zeger van Hese), and implemented the UK’s first real-time Interactive Application Security Testing solution. In 2017 he was co-chair of the first UKSTAR, and a contributor to the EuroSTAR ‘Little Book of Testing Wisdom’.

Michaël Pilaeten

Learning & Development Manager – CTG, Belgium

Breaking the system, helping to rebuild it, and providing advice and guidance on how to avoid problems. That’s me in a nutshell. With 17 years of experience in test consultancy in a variety of environments, I have seen the best (and worst) in software development. In my current role as Learning & Development Manager, I’m responsible for guiding our consultants, partners, and customers on their personal and professional path towards excellence. I’m chair of the ISTQB Agile workgroup and international keynote speaker (United Kingdom, France, Spain, Peru, Russia, Latvia, Denmark, Armenia, Romania, Belgium, Holland, Luxemburg, …)

Gitte Ottosen

Expert Test Consultant – Key2Quality, Denmark

Gitte Ottosen is a test manager and agile/quality coach with a strong focus on a value driven approach to software development. She has more than twenty years of experience in IT, primarily within test, along with test management and process improvement, in both traditional and agile contexts.

The last fifteen years she has primarily worked within an agile context, focusing on supporting a quality mindset across teams and organizations, and improving the processes for some of the largest international companies in Denmark.

As a self-confessed test and agile evangelist who preaches the need for a strong quality and value driven focus, Gitte is a strong advocate for a context-driven approach, a role requiring profound professional insight, passion, and persistence—qualities that Gitte holds in abundance. Gitte is a dedicated trainer within the areas of agile and test, and is a regular speaker at international conferences.

She holds several certificates within testing as well as agile; ISTQB Expert Level Test Management – Full, Certified agile tester (CAT), TMap Test Engineer, TMAP Organizing Built-in Quality at Scale, Certified SCRUM Master, & is a SAFe Program Consultant.

Dawid Pacia

JQA Manager – Docplanner, Poland

1/3 QA, 1/3 Python, 1/3 Lead. Tech freak following all the newest technologies (and implementing them on his own). Fan of the Agile approach to project management and products. After hours, active speaker and traveler. But most importantly the lover of ☕ and 🐱🐈.

Martin Pihl

Head of QA – Memmo, Sweden

Martin is one of those guys you meet and just think, “man, it’s fun talking to this guy, you know?” He comes from the south of Sweden (Malmoe) where he currently lives with his beautiful wife and 2 lovely sons in a smallish row-house. Which apparently, takes time and effort to maintain. Who’da thunk, right? Fun fact: if you forget he is from Malmoe, he will remind you. More than once. Martin studied System Engineering at Lunds University, after which he started a traineeship in test. He never looked back. In short, a good guy. You’d like him.

Richard Rostad

Consultant – Promis Qualify, Norway

Richard has been consulting in software QA (Quality Assessment) and testing for three decades, and has tested everything from mission critical industrial systems to browser games. These days he is focused on testing large, interconnected systems-of-systems faster and with less OPS overhead.

Rawad Mansour

QA Operational Manager – Murex Systems, Lebanon

Rawad is a Quality Assurance Manager at Murex with more than 10 years of experience in software testing, specialising in Bonds and Curves solutions on a capital market platform. He is currently in the role of “Test Lead” in one of the major trains as part of Murex Agile transformation.

For the past few years, Rawad has been focusing on implementing and promoting a new process for large scale management of clients’ reported defects in addition to many other projects like Configuration Management and Feedback Loop Optimisation.

Søren Wassard

QA Management Strategist – TestHuset, Denmark

I’m a father of two, husband to my lovely wife for 23 years, owner of a house in beautiful Fredensborg, a passionate climber/boulderer, and vice chairman of the board in our bouldering club. Spare time is spent with my family, walking our dog in the nearby forests, or climbing rocks (when not acting as carpenter, gardener, mechanic, electrician etc.) Besides that, I’m an agile evangelist. I’ve been spreading the word of agile for approximately 17 years now, and performed professional training in agile for the past 8 years. I’ve worked with IT for 25+ years, 15 of them solely focused on testing, but within the last few years I’ve shifted into training, and now have a larger focus on training and agile coaching, still with a flavor of test.