Speakers › TESTINGMIND

Learn from the Testing Experts

Home

Programme Schedule

Keynote Speaker

Christin Wiedemann

Senior Director, Slalom

Featured Speakers

Portrait of a smiling man with short dark hair and stubble, wearing a navy shirt against a blue gradient background.

Arash Taheri

Director, QA/QE, Central 1

Denys Kunytskyi

Lead Engineer, Benevity

Tatyana Arbouzova

Head of Dev Relations & Marketing, ContextQA

Jomina Jolly

Senior Software Engineer in Test, Eventbase Technologies

Vidhya Ranganathan

Staff Software Engineer, Quality, Okta

Balash Akbari

Staff Solution Architect – Quality Engineering, lululemon

Panel Discussion Speakers

Professional woman in a white blazer gesturing with her hands while speaking against a blue background

Snehal Lohar

Sr. Manager – Technical Program Manager, Motorola Solutions

Engineering leader with 22+ years of technology leadership, including deep experience owning platform engineering teams at the intersection of engineering, product, and finance. Proven track record leading backend and infrastructure teams delivering complex, high-reliability systems where accuracy and scale are non-negotiable.

Experienced partnering with Product, Finance, and Go-to-Market stakeholders to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions – driving architectural decisions, managing technical debt, and maintaining engineering best practices across the full delivery lifecycle.

Known for building and growing high-performing engineering teams through mentorship, inclusive culture-building, and clear execution discipline. An empathetic, accountable leader who communicates technical complexity and trade-offs with clarity to senior leadership, and who brings the operational rigor that mission-critical platform engineering demands.

Bahar Rostamkhani

AI Architect, Sycle

Experienced software engineering manager with a proven track record of leading high-performing teams. Skilled in project management, technical architecture, and cross-functional collaboration. Passionate about delivering innovative solutions and driving team success.

Mike Hrycyk

Vice President Service Delivery, West, PLATO Testing

Mike Hrycyk is passionate about quality. Quality in software, quality in requirements and quality in management. The biggest strength Mike brings to any organization is his ability to form the big picture of the entire enterprise in his head. This allows Mike to use this knowledge in figuring out the true requirements of the stakeholder, to better know the factors that will then be required in producing a properly integrated functional design or to know which systems will be impacted so that an appropriate test strategy and plan can be formed. Mike likes to build relationships within an organization to allow communication to become easy, productive and efficient.

Eldon Wong

Director of Software Engineering, Caracal Technologies Inc

Balash Akbari

Staff Solution Architect – Quality Engineering, lululemon

An innovative software architect and a hands-on technical lead with proactive people skills. Highly adept in planning, designing, developing and integrating test automation frameworks, automated tests, and performance testing.

Extensive experience in automated and performance testing anywhere from creating test automation frameworks for device-drivers for Windows, to developing load and performance tests for enterprise applications, to developing automated tests for dynamic web pages.

Highly versatile set of technical and management skills that can be quickly adapted to any software development and business environment.

Learn from the Testing Experts

Keynote Speaker

Christin Wiedemann

Senior Director, Slalom

Featured Speakers

Arash Taheri

Director, QA/QE, Central 1

Denys Kunytskyi

Lead Engineer, Benevity

Tatyana Arbouzova

Head of Dev Relations & Marketing, ContextQA

Jomina Jolly

Senior Software Engineer in Test, Eventbase Technologies

Vidhya Ranganathan

Staff Software Engineer, Quality, Okta

Balash Akbari

Staff Solution Architect – Quality Engineering, lululemon

Panel Discussion Speakers

Snehal Lohar

Sr. Manager – Technical Program Manager, Motorola Solutions

Experienced partnering with Product, Finance, and Go-to-Market stakeholders to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions – driving architectural decisions, managing technical debt, and maintaining engineering best practices across the full delivery lifecycle.

Bahar Rostamkhani

AI Architect, Sycle

Experienced software engineering manager with a proven track record of leading high-performing teams. Skilled in project management, technical architecture, and cross-functional collaboration. Passionate about delivering innovative solutions and driving team success.

Mike Hrycyk

Vice President Service Delivery, West, PLATO Testing

Eldon Wong

Director of Software Engineering, Caracal Technologies Inc

Balash Akbari

Staff Solution Architect – Quality Engineering, lululemon

An innovative software architect and a hands-on technical lead with proactive people skills. Highly adept in planning, designing, developing and integrating test automation frameworks, automated tests, and performance testing.

Extensive experience in automated and performance testing anywhere from creating test automation frameworks for device-drivers for Windows, to developing load and performance tests for enterprise applications, to developing automated tests for dynamic web pages.

Highly versatile set of technical and management skills that can be quickly adapted to any software development and business environment.

CONNECTING QA PROFESSIONALS GLOBALLY

Stay updated

Follow us

Arash Taheri

Director, QA/QE, Central 1

Quality Engineering Strategy and the Culture of Testing in the Age of AI

Takeaways from your talk

Denys Kunytskyi

Lead Engineer, Benevity

Left Doesn’t Mean Right: Principles We Forgot

Every few years we rediscover an old classic thing, stamp a new name onto it, and call it a revolutionary breakthrough. Shift-left was the last one. We moved testing left. We never actually got it right – and the next rebrand won’t either, unless we fix what actually broke underneath it.

People are already calling this “AI test theater” – same theater, new decade. It’s the absence-of-errors fallacy, the same testing principle, just running at machine speed now.

This talk connects both stories — and gets specific about what it actually takes to rebuild that trust, so the next “you’re absolutely right, I shouldn’t have done that” happens in review, not in production.

Takeaways from your talk

Tatyana Arbouzova

Head of Dev Relations & Marketing, ContextQA

From Co-Pilot to Colleague, at Enterprise Scale

AI can generate tests. But can it deliver quality?

For most teams, the honest answer is “not yet.” AI co-pilots have made individual testing tasks dramatically faster:

We’d automated the tasks. We hadn’t automated the initiative.

You’ll leave with a simple question to take back to your own team: Where does your AI still wait for a human to start the work? Then come find us at the ContextQA booth to see how far that answer can go.

Takeaways from your talk

Christin Wiedemann

Senior Director, Slalom

Entering the Golden Era of Software Quality: Why this is the best time in history to be a tester

Takeaways from your talk

Jomina Jolly

Senior Software Engineer in Test, Eventbase Technologies

Mobile & API-first testing strategies

If you are dealing with a backend-driven mobile app, this session is for you.

Discussion points API-first foundation Mobile strategy on top of the API AI and agentic testing Pipeline and production Proven vs. emerging strategy in mobile automation testing Our take on moving from automated to Autonomous testing (a work in progress) and lessons learned.

Takeaways from your talk

Contract first. Make the API contract the gate; it catches the most bugs with the least maintenance. Thin, smart mobile layer. Fewer UI tests, aimed at what only a device can reveal. Autonomy is the future of testing — but autonomy without contracts is just faster chaos.

Vidhya Ranganathan

Staff Software Engineer, Quality, Okta

The Verification Loop: Why AI-Era Quality Runs on Context and Feedback

AI has made writing code cheap. Verifying it has not. Teams now ship more changes than they can confidently test, and quality has quietly become the bottleneck in software delivery.

In 15 years of quality engineering, the pattern I see most is not missing tests. It’s tests that run blind: no idea what changed, why it matters, or what broke last time.

This is not a finished framework. It’s a working model, with open questions and early lessons you can apply to your own pipeline

Takeaways from your talk

Alex Khvastovich

Staff QA Engineer, Nuclearn.ai

The evolving QA role — from tester to quality architect

Product teams need evidence before they can sign off on a release. This practical session shows how the QA role evolves from executing tests to designing quality gates that verify agreed release criteria and make remaining risks visible.

Takeaways from your talk

Discussion points

API-first foundation

Mobile strategy on top of the API

AI and agentic testing

Pipeline and production

Proven vs. emerging strategy in mobile automation testing

Our take on moving from automated to Autonomous testing (a work in progress) and lessons learned.

Contract first. Make the API contract the gate; it catches the most bugs with the least maintenance.

Thin, smart mobile layer. Fewer UI tests, aimed at what only a device can reveal.

Autonomy is the future of testing — but autonomy without contracts is just faster chaos.