Speakers & Sessions

Sessions at CodeChef TechTalks

Topic: Trends in Agile Testing

A brief background about different types/styles of testing and how they evolved.
How Agile changes things
What are the techniques you find most people moving towards these days and the rationale behind the same
What tools are helpful and what are not
Concluding thoughts, what is missing in the whole Agile testing space that needs immediate attention and innovation?

Speaker: Lisa Crispin

Lisa Crispin is an agile testing coach and practitioner. She is the co-author, with Janet Gregory, of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams (Addison-Wesley, 2009). She works as the Director of Agile Software Development at Ultimate Software. Lisa specializes in showing testers and agile teams how testers can add value and how to guide development with business-facing tests. Lisa joined her first agile team in 2000, having enjoyed many years working as a programmer, analyst, tester, and QA director. She currently works as a tester and ScrumMaster on a team producing a web-based .Net application. From 2003 until 2009, she was a tester on a Scrum/XP team developing a web-based J2EE application at ePlan Services, Inc. She frequently leads tutorials and workshops on agile testing at conferences in North America and Europe. Lisa regularly contributes articles about agile testing to publications such as Better Software magazine, IEEE Software, and Methods and Tools. Lisa also co-authored Testing Extreme Programming (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2002) with Tip House. For more about Lisa's work, visit www.lisacrispin.com.

Topic: Releasing Every Week to Production
Speaker: Owen Rogers

Owen Rogers is a developer at Pulse Energy, where his team has been deploying releases to production every week for the past year. He is formerly an Agile coach and consultant with ThoughtWorks helping teams make the transition to Agile methods in Sweden, UK, India, China and Canada. He is a regular speaker at Agile conferences and is one of the organizers of the first Agile India conference. He has been the project lead for a number of open source tools including CruiseControl.NET, dbdeploy.net and NMock. For more about Owen's work, visit http://exortech.com/blog/.

Topic: Building Scalable Platforms/Architectures
Speaker: Bhavin Turakhia

Bhavin Turakhia is the CEO and Founder of Directi, a 300+ million dollars group of Business Units, that develop innovative mass-market Web Products serving millions of Customers worldwide. He is chiefly responsible for the vision and architecture of Directi's Products and services.

A techie at heart, Bhavin has been designing, architecting and coding applications since the early 90s. Bhavin has been an active speaker in the tech community and blogs at bhavin.directi.com. He spends a fair bit of time in conceptualizing high-available and scalable architectures for various Directi products.

Topic: RDBMS Vs. Other Data Stores for Scalability

Ramki will discuss non-relational approaches to data stores, their relevance and the growing need for stores, how some of those alternatives can help make the application scalable and in some other cases how they can allow certain operations that are not possible with a typical RDBMS.

Speaker: Ramki Gaddipati

Ramki Gaddipati, a Tech Lead at Directi is passionate about software architecture, extensibility and scalability. The latter are the principle doctrines of the products he architects. Ramki is responsible for the delivery of some of the most important products in the .pw suite of products which involve a host of technologies and challenges on the server side, desktops and browsers.

Prior to joining Directi, Ramki worked for Morgan Stanley and Leapstone Systems in addition to doing a startup - Bridle, the flagship product of which is SchoolMATE. BusinessWeek recognized him as one among the five Best Entrepreneurs in Asia under the age of 25, in the year 2006.

Ramki holds a Masters Degree in Management and an Engineering Masters in Software Systems from BITS, Pilani.

Ramki blogs at: http://blog.folks.in and you can contact him at http://www.folks.in

Topic: Avatars of TDD

It is very clear to most of the people that testing results in better design. But it might not be so obvious that your approach to testing or the way you think about tests can result in quite different tests and hence its impact on the design.

Naresh will highlight the commonly used avatars of TDD, i.e., form, style and/or approach. Based on their approach, Naresh categorizes the avatars of TDD into two broad categories, Outside-In and Inside-Out. Each category has two distinct avatars under them. Naresh will use the class diagram of the resultant domain model and the test cases from the pairing sessions to explain each of the avatars.

Speaker: Naresh Jain

Naresh Jain is a Software Craftsman @ heart, Recovering Agilist to strangers; Naresh leads Industrial Logic's initiatives in Asia. From Organizational Transformation to enhanced Developer productivity, Naresh helps organizations embrace Agile and Lean thinking.

Naresh is passionate about building a community of talented and capable software craftsman, the next generation software leaders in India. In recognition of his accomplishments, in 2007 the Agile Alliance awarded Naresh with the Gordon Pask Award for contributions to the Agile Community by establishing Agile User Groups in India and for creating the Simple Design and Testing conference. At present this is the most prestigious award in the Agile community.