Speaker Bio:  

Shankar V
Associate Vice President  , Zensar Technologies
Shankar heads the Testing Practice of Zensar which has over 350 Test Practitioners. He has over 31 years of experience. He joined Zensar in 1999 after 23.5 years tenure with the Indian Air Force. During his tenure with Zensar, he has handled diverse engagements including setting up and growing a Global Applications Support Centre for P&O Nedlloyd, strengthening and growing a Delivery Centre for National Grid and stabilizing two emerging ODCs for Merrill Lynch and Investec. He also led the largest ODC for Cisco with over 600 Associates. Prior to taking up his role as Practice Head for Testing, he was involved with setting up Zensar’s operations in Gdansk, Poland where he had the responsibility for expanding Zensar’s business footprint in CEE and Nordic countries as well as setting up a Global Delivery Centre.
T Ashok
Founder and CEO, STAG Software Pvt Ltd
MS in Computer Science (IIT Chicago), BE(Electronics and Communication) Anna University, CSQE(ASQC). Spearheads the operations of STAG, has 18+ years of working experience. Setup and managed global test group at VeriFone. Active in test engineering community, have given 10+ lectures in test forums, and presented about 10 tutorials/papers in International / National conferences. He is highly passionate about software test engineering and devotes time in his lab pursuing his interests in software patterns, test design, test automation, object technology, process engineering and measurement.
Anuradha Biswas
CEO, Prakat Solutions
Anuradha Biswas, founder and CEO of Prakat Solutions, has been an evangelist for independent testing through her 18+ years of experience where customers were outsourcing the entire lifecycle and not paying specific attention to testing. Anu has been part of the core team setting up independent software testing businesses at Computer Associates TCG, Aztecsoft (now Mindtree) and Infosys. She has extensive experience in organization building, service portfolio creation, business planning, enabling the sales force, skills development etc. Prior to setting up Prakat, she was Associate Vice President of the Independent Validation Solutions group at Infosys which she co-founded and which grew to 8000 people over 8 years. Her vision at Prakat Solutions is to create a software testing organization that is massively distributed, flexible, with mature processes and provides the ability to leverage Prakats pay-as-you-go test environments to ensure predictable outcomes.
Srinivas Chintha
Director, Product Development, Sabre Holdings
Srinivas is the Director of Software Development leading the Testing, Consulting and Quality initiatives in Sabre Holdings and also heads the Central Automation organization responsible for all TPF product areas. Srinivas in his prior role lead a Product Marketing team in charge of mobility, integration solutions, hotels and site quality. Srinivas has a Masters Degree in Computer Science and an MBA in Marketing from the University of Texas at Dallas, with a Bachelors degree in Chemical Engineering
Mahesh Saptarshi
Technical Director, Symantec
Mahesh is a technical director, and his team responsible for assuring security quality of Symantec products. His team works closely with product teams to ensure that the products are designed, implemented, deployed and configured with highest possible security assurance. In his 17 years of experience in software industry he has played many roles including design engineer, programmer and architect as well as of manager of large and small teams.
Dr. Mandaar Bhaskar Pande
Delivery Manager, Wipro Technologies
Dr. Mandaar Bhaskar Pande, has over 16 years of total experience with around 12+ years of IT experience at various technical and managerial positions like Creating and owning Performance Engineering Practice, Managing Deliveries of Performance Engineering projects, Leading a Technology focused groups, Leading Pre-sales. He is a Ph.D. in Laser Physics from Hyderabad Central University, 1994. He is a Senior Member, International Electronics & Electrical Engineers Association (IEEE) and Project Management Institute (PMI) 2005-2008. His areas of expertise include Technical Presales, Delivery of projects, Team building and Development, Setting up of technology focused groups, Business Development strategy, Creation of GTM strategies, Development of new Lines of Business. Mandaar currently works as a delivery manager at Wipro Technologies.
Dr. Asheesh Choksi
Associate Test Architect, Harbinger
Dr. Asheesh Choksi is a Ph.D. from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT – Bombay) in Micro-electronics. Asheesh has solid 14 years of Research and Industrial Experience. During this period he worked with different organizations on a wide variety of projects from the statistical analysis for the process capability baseline to the development of web based applications. Over last 10 years he has been actively pursuing his interest in Software Quality Management. Asheesh specializes in Test Automation of Web based applications using open source technologies. At Harbinger Systems, he has developed Test Automation suite in several projects with Ruby, Watir and Fitnesse. Under the guidance of senior management Asheesh has also authored a white paper on Design guidelines for the Test Automation Framework using these technologies.
Charles Thangamuthu
Manager, PTC
Charles is a Mechanical Engineering Graduate with 14 years of experience in the IT industry. He has spent 11 of these years at PTC in the Testing and Quality Assurance domain. In his role as a QA Manager, Charles is responsible for establishing and implementing standard methods for test design and execution. Over the years, he has played a vital role in establishing a 300+ strong global team which is focused on testing the product Windchill®, which is PTCs Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software for managing product content and processes. He has the experience of shepherding the testing of several major releases of Windchill® and helping the big product development companies across the world successfully deploy it. He is passionate about Test Automation. Test optimization, improving test practices and processes and implementing agile methodologies in testing are his other areas of interest
Maheshan Chemminiyan
Technology Copentence Group (Application Security), L&T Infotech
Maheshan C N has over 11 years of total IT experience, over 5 years of experience in the Application Security domain alone. He is IBM Rational AppScan ProMetric certified, a Fortify software consultant, Gardium first level consultant, and a CISA. He currently works in the technology Competence Group (Application Security) at L&T Infotech.
Amitabh Kaushal
Performance Test Manager, IBM
Amitabh Kaushal has more than 12 years of software industry experience. Currently, he is associated with IBM as a Performance Test Manager. Amitabh has B.Tech. degree in Computer System from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Amitabh has a comprehensive knowledge on Identity & Access Management, Anti-virus and Security domain. Amitabh in his current role, responsible for streamlining performance testing activity like – Performance Test Execution, Monitoring, Analysis and Scalability Testing, Building Test Framework and managing Performance test cycles in multi-project environment. Amitabh was instrumental in implementing and re-engineering the performance framework within IBM and assisting other teams to incorporate it. Prior to joining IBM he has worked for companies like Avaya, BMC and McAfee (I) Pvt Ltd.
Amita Vaidya
QA & Test Manager, Patni
Amita Vaidya is a QA Manager with over 17 years of experience. During her 10 years at Patni she has managed product testing for multiple Tier1 customers. She has been instrumental in initiating several test engagements in the Storage Networking and Computing domain. Her area of expertise includes Functional, Performance and Localization testing. Amita is a Electrical engineering graduate from Bombay University – Sardar Patel College of Engineering and has a Post Diploma in Computer Applications.
Naveen Gurusiddaiah
Technology Evangelist, Micro Focus
Naveen G is a Phd holder and a qualified MBA with 11 years of working experience in different domains like Information Technology,Finance, Sales and Marketing. Earlier in Borland he was involved in the pre-sales and post-sales activities, which comprises hand holding with the customers during the evaluation phase or piloting of a project for conducting the proof of concept study. Continuing the role and responsibilities in Micro Focus, he is also into mobilizing and training partner’s technical teams to address customers needs and requirements. He is engaged in conducting Seminars at various forums and has been actively involved in the Corporate Market Development of India Region for Application Management and Quality tools and technologies of Micro Focus. Naveen is indulged in imparting and implementing Software Engineering activities and techniques assocaited with the Micro Focus unique methodology of Continuos Quality Assurance, thereby empowering and enhancing the usability of Micro Focus Solutions.