Liliia Abdulina

JetBrains, France

I’ve been with JetBrains for over 7 years, currently serving as the Head of QA in the Open Source Ecosystem Department, where I lead the quality assurance for the Kotlin programming language and its ecosystem.

With a background in computer science and over 10 years of experience in the IT industry, my expertise spans mobile QA, software development, and ensuring the quality of large-scale, complex projects like Kotlin.

Mark Harman

Meta, UK

Mark Harman is a full-time Research Scientist at Meta Platforms working on software engineering automation.  He was previously in the Simulation-Based Testing (SBT) team at Meta, which he co-founded.

The SBT team developed and deployed both the Sapienz and WW platforms for client- and server- side testing. Sapienz grew out of Majicke (a start up Mark co-founded) that was acquired by Facebook (now Meta Platforms) in 2017.

The technologies Mark has researched, developed and deployed have been used to test systems of 100s of millions of lines of lines of code, daily relied upon by over 3 billion people for communications, business, social media and community building.

The commercial viability of approximatively 200 million companies worldwide rests on the reliability of these systems, for which this automated testing work plays an important role. Mark is also a part time professor at UCL. In his more purely scientific work, he co-founded the field Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) in 2001, now the subject of active research in over 40 countries worldwide.

He received the IEEE Harlan Mills Award and the ACM Outstanding Research Award in 2019 for his research work, and was awarded a fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2020.

Ivan Merola

Build 38, Spain

Ivan became QA tester, for more than 9 years now, working with many different frameworks and programming languages, as well as working in big and small companies and abroad.

The past 2+ years he’s been working on a cybersecurity company, and he was presenting his experience in the previous EuroStar.

Cristian Merola

Esneca, Spain

Cristian has a bachelors degree in Audiovisual communication and Journalism and a masters degree in Digital marketing. For the last 2 years, he’s been working on AI prompting text generation and editor.

Geosley Andrades

ACCELQ, India

Geosley is a Senior Director, Product Evangelist, and Community Builder at ACCELQ, dedicated to uniting the testing community through the QCommunity of Test Automation Enthusiasts.

With 16 years in the Software Testing industry, he has experience at JP Morgan Chase, BNP Paribas, Cornerstone OnDemand, and Infosys. Geosley is a Certified Agile Leader, Certified Scrum Master, Salesforce Certified Associate, Six Sigma Yellow Belt, ISTQB certified, and an AWS Certified Solutions Architect.

A passionate Test Automation Enthusiast, he has spoken at EuroSTAR, AutomationSTAR, Test Masters Academy, Agile Testing Days, and many other prestigious events.

Mark Micallef

University of Malta, Malta

Mark is a software testing researcher, lecturer and occasional practitioner. Whilst in his role as an Associate Professor at the University of Malta, his day job is focused mostly on academic aspects of the field, Mark has worked and consulted for companies internationally, spoken at industry conferences such as the Google Test Automation conferences and has a doctorate in software engineering.

Today, Mark spends most of his time looking into open problems in software testing with a particular focus on the human tester.

James Bornefelt Westfall

Neatframe AS, Norway

James has been working for over 20 years in software and hardware development. He has worked with test automation since 2008 and has gradually switched from a successful developer and architect role over to an experienced test automation specialist role.

He focuses on how automatic end-to-end testing can bring together all the participants in an agile team and deliver value early in the requirements gathering and active development stages, long before the software is close to being finished.

When not giving Neat’s video-conference solutions strange dreams, James enjoys the Norwegian outdoors, especially when skiing and fly-fishing.

Usha Kandala

Firebucks, India

Usha Kandala is a senior Project Management and Quality Assurance professional with over 20 years of experience in developing and managing software products and product class applications. 

She initiated and developed QA practices and release processes in start-up environments, provided leadership and guidance to different teams running multiple product releases, and piloted globally distributed QA teams.

She holds a Master of Liberal Arts degree in Management & Operations from Harvard University, USA; and a Masters degree in Computer Science from Osmania University, India. 

She is also an alumnus of Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Entrepreneurship Program from IIM Bangalore, India.

Elif Gurcuoglu

Adesso, Turkey

Tech Lead with a background of working in various roles such as Project manager, QA manager, and product owner for large-scale global companies. Starting her career as a business analyst, she gained hands-on experience with a wide range of technologies.

After having years of experience in digital product management; she brought her learnings into the quality assurance field. Today, she’s the Head of Quality Assurance at adesso Turkey as well as contributing some of the Projects as a Delivery Manager.

Together with her team consists of 40 QA and Automation engineers, she focuses on boosting quality and delivery in the Projects.