GTAC 2014: Speaker Profiles

AI-generated Key Takeaways

• Alex Eagle is involved in Google's developer testing tools, focusing on continuous integration, explaining build/test failures, and improving test effectiveness.

• Amit Easow works on continuous testing infrastructure for Comcast's X1 Entertainment Operating System.

• Andrei Chirila is a Software Engineer in Test at Google focused on enhancing engineering experience for Ads and Commerce and developing productivity tools, including a code coverage solution used internally.

• Ankit Mehta leads test efforts for Google's Social Product Area, including Google+, Photos, Hangouts, Blogger, and News, with an interest in balancing velocity and quality.

• Anthony Voellm leads the Google Cloud Performance Team, focusing on delivering price performance and innovating new cloud offerings, with experience in various technical areas and multiple technology patents.

• Brian Vance works on Google-wide test infrastructure and leads database test teams for Spanner, Dremel, and BigQuery, focusing on improving engineering productivity.

• Bryan Robbins is a Developer in Test at FINRA, specializing in automated solutions for Web and Big Data applications and contributing to open-source projects, while also researching model-based testing at the University of Maryland.

• Celal Ziftci works at Google New York focusing on developer productivity and automation, with research interests in software testing, analytics, program analysis, and applications of data mining and machine learning.

• Daniel Koo is an Engineering Director at FINRA, leading automation engineering, architecture, and tools development, and is an active open-source contributor.

• Dominik Dary is an Engineering Manager at Adobe Hamburg, part of the Shared Cloud team, and is the creator of Selendroid and a recognized expert in test engineering and automation.

• Gareth Bowles is a member of the Engineering Tools team at Netflix, building cloud automation and continuous integration tools to enable engineers to build, test, and deploy services.

• James Graham is an automation and tools engineer for Mozilla, focused on developing infrastructure for web-platform-tests to improve browser interoperability.

• Jay Srinivasan is the product manager for real device infrastructure at Google, and was previously co-founder and CEO of Appurify.

• Karin Lundberg is a Software Engineer in Test at Google leading automation testing for Chrome Mobile and working on various aspects of build and test infrastructure and engineering productivity.

• Lior Reuven is an R&D Manager at HP Software and founder of catjs, focusing on improving the mobile-web experience.

• Manish Lachwani is the tech lead for real device infrastructure at Google, with expertise across the mobile stack and 21 patents in various technology areas.

• Michael Bailey is the Engineering Director for the Android team responsible for American Express's flagship consumer Android apps in the U.S. market.

• Nan Li is a Software Design Engineer in Test at Medidata Solutions, leading research in big data testing and building a scalable big data test framework.

• Olivier Etienne is the technical leader of a development team at Orange focused on making life easier for other development teams through software architecture, mocking, and test automation.

• Patrick Lam is an Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo whose research interests include making static analysis tools accessible and useful to developers, and who teaches software testing.

• Ran Snir is a software developer at HP Software and co-creator of catjs, interested in facing new challenges and connecting the physical world to the computer world.

• Roy Williams is the manager of the Product Stability team at Facebook, which owns continuous integration and testing frameworks, and previously worked at Google Maps and Microsoft.

• Sonal Shah leads teams at Google that build Google-wide test infrastructure for Java frontends and real-time auction-based ad serving backends.

• Stefan Ramsauer is a Software Engineer in Test at Google in San Francisco with experience in automation and embedded systems industries.

• Thomas Knych is a Staff Software Engineer in Test at Google and the tech lead for Mobile Ninjas, an effort to bring state-of-the-art testing to Android Developers at Google scale.

• Valera Zakharov is passionate about helping engineers enjoy testing their code and leads development of Espresso, an open-source UI test framework for Android, at Google.

• Vishal Arora is a Software Engineer at Dropbox leading the developer tools team focused on version control, distributed build, and continuous test systems, and previously specialized in testing web applications at Google.

• Vishal Sethia leads an effort at Google to bring Android Emulators within a user's Chrome browser and previously worked at Pace Americas.

• Zack Newsham is undertaking an M.ASc in Computer Science with research interests in distributed and parallel systems, cryptography, and SAT.

Alex Eagle Alex has worked for the last five years in Google's developer testing tools. He has developed systems including Google's continuous integration service, capturing build&test failures, and explaining them to developers. Part of the job is helping engineers make their tests more effective, by explaining how to reduce maintenance costs and catch real defects. Before Google, Alex worked at startups including Opower, and consulted for large government IT. In his 20% time, he created the Error-Prone static analysis tool, which detects common Java programming mistakes and reports them as compile errors.

Amit Easow Amit has been building and launching websites and mobile applications for Comcast since 2006 and is currently working on the continuous testing infrastructure of the X1 Entertainment Operating System. Amit has a Master’s degree in Telecommunications and Networking from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Madras University, India.

Andrei Chirila Andrei is a Software Engineer in Test at Google, currently involved in enhancing the engineering experience for Ads and Commerce, specifically Shopping, and developing productivity tools to solve specific needs. While at Google, Andrei has been involved in the project which later became the code coverage solution inside Google and this solution is used by more than 1000 internal projects, providing a huge amount of data on code coverage. Andrei previouslly worked for Skoobe, a German company reinventing the reading experience.

Ankit Mehta Ankit joined Google in Dec 2003 lured by free food and an opportunity to play a role in how Testing evolves @ Google. Over the 10+ year career at Google he has worked in many product areas and currently leads test efforts for the Social Product Area @ Google; which consists of projects like Google+, Photos, Hangouts, Blogger, News, etc. Ankit is particularly interested in pushing the limits on the balance between Velocity and Quality.

Anthony Voellm Anthony F. Voellm is currently leading the Google Cloud Performance Team and has a wide range of experience from kernel and database engines to graphics and automated image and map extraction from satellite images. Anthony is an avid inventor with 7 technology patents issued. In his current role at Google Anthony is focused on delivering Price Performance to existing products like Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud Storage while also innovating new offerings. Anthony holds a Master of Science from George Washington University, BA in Physics and a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Vermont.

Brian Vance Brian Vance joined Google in 2007 and has worked on Google-wide test infrastructure projects, Google Compute Engine, and multiple Display Ads projects. He currently leads database test teams for Spanner, Dremel, & BigQuery, building test tools and frameworks. Brian is passionate about improving engineering productivity through automation, tools, and cross-team collaboration.

Bryan Robbins Bryan is a Developer in Test at FINRA, where he designs and develops automated solutions for functional and performance testing of Web and Big Data applications. He contributes to FINRA’s MSL, ExtWebDriver, and Data Generator open-source projects. Bryan is also a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he researches model-based testing and contributes to the GUITAR project. In addition to the above, his current interests also include DevOps, Cloud and container-based automation solutions, and probabilistic approaches to testing challenges.

Celal Ziftci Born and raised in Turkey, where he attended Bilkent University, Celal moved to the USA to obtain his graduate degree. He holds a Masters degree from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, and a PhD from the University of California San Diego, both in Computer Science. He is currently working at the Google New York office with a focus on developer productivity and automation. He is interested in software testing, software analytics, program analysis, and applications of data mining and machine learning in these fields.

Daniel Koo Daniel is an Engineering Director at FINRA, responsible for leading automation engineering, architecture and tools development. He is a big fan of open source and is an active contributor in the open source community. He is the original creator of ExtWebDriver and MSL, and continues to develop tools and frameworks to enable delivery of better software. Prior to joining FINRA, Daniel worked as a software developer and lead at various different places including Sun Microsystems, IBM, and BlackBerry.

Dominik Dary Dominik Dary works at Adobe Hamburg as Engineering Manager (Chapter Lead Quality), where he is part of the Shared Cloud team. He's the creator of Selendroid. Dominik is a recognized expert in test engineering and test automation and has spoken at many conferences around the world.

Gareth Bowles Gareth started out as a developer and later graduated to breaking other people's software instead of his own, before realizing that his real passion is getting software to customers faster, cheaper, and more reliably - and getting a good night's sleep in the process. Gareth has practiced and managed quality engineering and technical operations at various Silicon Valley companies, from six-person startups to major industry players. He's currently a member of the Engineering Tools team at Netflix, where he builds cloud automation and continuous integration tools that enable any engineer to build, test, and deploy the services that make up the Netflix movie and TV streaming operation.

James Graham James is an automation and tools engineer for Mozilla, working out of the London office. He has been involved with web standards for over a decade and, after realizing he could make a career from this hobby, he joined Opera Software, first as a test engineer in the browser core team, before becoming involved in overhauling the automated test systems. Since moving to Mozilla he has been focused on developing infrastructure for the web-platform-tests, a W3C-led initiative to improve browser interoperability through testing.

Jay Srinivasan Jay is currently the product manager for real device infrastructure at Google. Prior to its acquisition to Google, he was co-founder and CEO of Appurify. Before Appurify, Jay worked on product management at Zynga, and sales, marketing and lean operations at McKinsey and Co.

Karin Lundberg Karin Lundberg has been a Software Engineer in Test at Google for more than 6 years working on various projects including Google+. The last 2.5+ years she has lead the automation testing for Chrome Mobile (iOS and Android) and worked on build and test infrastructure; functional, performance and stability testing; engineering productivity; enabling web developers to run tests on Chrome on Android; and much more. When she is not busy making Chrome the best mobile browser, she likes to spend time with her family and enjoy the nice Californian weather (very different from Denmark where she grew up).

Lior Reuven Lior is R&D Manger at HP Software and founder of catjs. Served in various roles in both production monitoring ( APM / BSM ) and testing area ( QM / ALM ). Lior is focusing on making mobile-web better, as the catjs motto. Always looking for something new.

Manish Lachwani Manish is a mobile debugging, performance optimization, and testing researcher and evangelist, and currently the tech lead for real device infrastructure at Google. Prior to its acquisition by Google, he was co-founder and CTO of Appurify. Manish brings a unique blend of expertise across the entire mobile stack. As a systems architect at Amazon Kindle, he designed the operating system for the Kindle line of products. At MontaVista, he was among a select group of MIPS/ARM architects that worked on the first multicore real time Linux OS, Linux 2.4 and 2.6 versions. Manish holds 21 patents in the areas of USB, Power Management, Chargers, System Debugging and Validation.

Michael Bailey Michael is the Engineering Director for the Android team responsible for American Express’ flagship consumer Android apps in the U.S. market. Development on these apps began in 2010. Since joining the company in 2008, Michael has worked on a number initiatives at American Express including analytics, enterprise content management, AmexLabs, iOS apps, international mobile applications, NFC payments, the U.S. homepage and the U.S. online card applications site. Michael holds a BS in Computer Science from Harvey Mudd College and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, where he specialized in computer security. Including the U.S. consumer apps that Michael works on, American Express has 8 Android apps in the U.S. Google Play Store and more in the international Play Stores.

Nan Li Nan Li is a Software Design Engineer in Test at Medidata Solutions where he has been working on big data testing. In addition to leading the research of big data testing, test generation, and test automation, he is also architecting and building a scalable big data test framework. He received PhD in IT with concentration on Software Engineering from George Mason University, and B.E. in Software Engineering from Beihang University.

Olivier Etienne Olivier is currently the technical leader of a development team on the Orange TV SetTopBox. Their job is to make life easier for all other development teams. Their intervention range covers software architecture, mocking, and test automation. Prior to Orange, Olivier has worked as a software architect for companies such as AirFrance, CNES, Thales Alenia Space or Sanofi.

Patrick Lam Patrick Lam is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Associate Director of Software Engineering at the University of Waterloo. One of his research interests is making static analysis tools accessible and useful to developers. Patrick teaches a course on software testing and would like to learn more about testing as applied in industry.

Ran Snir Ran is a software developer at HP Software and co-creator of catjs. Before joining to catjs he was part of the Innovation Group. During his studies he was granted a Microsoft Scholarship of excellence. He enjoys facing new challenges, connecting between the physical world to the computer world and playing with Arduino.

Roy Williams Roy Williams has been working on Developer Tools for the past 10 years and is extremely passionate about building productive engineering organizations. He is the manager of the Product Stability team at Facebook, which owns all of the continuos integration and testing frameworks there. Before Facebook, Roy worked on Google Maps, creating the first unit testing framework for WebGL, and previous to that worked at Microsoft on Performance Engineering as well as some speculative projects. Roy graduated from Duke University with a BSc. In Computer Science in 2005, and lives in the Bay Area with his wife Tara and son Hudson

Sonal Shah Sonal joined Google in March 2008. Since then she has been part of various Display Ads teams in New York and is currently engaged with DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Prior to joining Google, Sonal spent 7 years at various internet advertising companies including DoubleClick, writing test automation and building testing frameworks. At Google, Sonal leads teams that build Google wide test infrastructure for Java frontends and real time auction based ad serving backends. Sonal has a BE in Electronics and Telecommunications from University of Pune, India and loves spending time playing tennis and freezing moments in time with her camera.

Stefan Ramsauer Stefan Ramsauer is a Software Engineer in Test at Google in San Francisco. He holds a Master's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Hagen and in Electrical Engineering from Regensburg University of Applied Sciences. Prior to joining Google, Stefan spent over 10 years working in the automation and embedded systems industries as a Software Engineer.

Thomas Knych Thomas Knych is a Staff Software Engineer in Test at Google. He is the tech lead for Mobile Ninjas, an ambitious effort to bring state-of-the-art testing at Google scale to all Android Developers. Thomas’s wide variety of interests include Continuous Integration Testing, Hermetic Servers, Virtualization and Emulator Infrastructure. Prior to joining Google, Thomas spent 5 years in New York City working as a Software Architect at Citigroup Global.

Valera Zakharov Valera is passionate about helping engineers enjoy testing their own code. At Google, he works with a small team of engineers on a mission to make the company better at creating Android applications. He leads development of Espresso - an open source UI test framework for Android - and looks forward to making more internal tools and infrastructure available to external developers.

Vishal Arora Vishal is passionate about efficiency, developer productivity and ice cream. As a Software Engineer at Dropbox, he leads the developer tools team and is pushing the limits of their version control, distributed build and continuous test systems. Before that, he spent over 7 years at Google specializing in testing web applications like AdWords, honing his skills with Selenium and improving the Google Web Toolkit. In a past life, Vishal worked on a manufacturing test platform by National Instruments and completed a Master's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. If you meet Vishal, ask him about code health, college football or Zambia.

Vishal Sethia Vishal joined Google in 2010 and has worked to increase the productivity of the Shopper Engineering team based in Waterloo with increased automated test coverage. Vishal currently leads an ambitious effort at Google to bring Android Devices known as Emulators within a user’s Chrome browser. Prior to joining Google, he worked as a software engineer for Pace Americas (erstwhile 2Wire Inc.) and has a Master’s degree in Computer Science and Math from Ohio University.

Zack Newsham Zack is currently undertaking an M.ASc in Computer Science and studied for his B.Sc in Software Engineering at the University of Glamorgan, for which he received a first in 2012. His research interests are primarily in distributed and parallel systems, as well as cryptography and SAT.