Alex Harms wants to make the world a little gentler for developers and tech teams. By teaching and coaching from a place of mindfulness and empathy, Alex helps disempower fear, strengthen communication and build connection, so that tech teams learn together and thrive. Alex is the host of the Geek Joy Podcast, author of The Little Guide to Empathetic Technical Leadership, and coach at Maitria.

Andrea Goulet is the CEO of Corgibytes, a software development shop dedicated to maintaining and modernizing software applications and has been named by LinkedIn as one of the top 10 professionals in software under 35. She’s the founder of LegacyCode.Rocks and hosts a podcast dedicated to changing the way we think about legacy code. She speaks frequently about building a business based on balance, empathy, and trust; the perils of the technical/non-technical divide; and the technical philosophies around working with legacy code. Andrea is currently working on her first book, Becoming Technical: Build an Amazing Career in Tech Starting at Square Zero.

In her spare time, Andrea enjoys hosting Free Code Camp events at her local co-working space and blogging at Empathy Driven Development. She loves watching her kids explore the world and is a sucker for a good physics documentary. You can recognize her by the JavaScript tattoo on her wrist.

Jessica Kerr loves software because it is the most malleable building material humans have ever created. At Atomist, she develops software for automating software development. She works remotely from St Louis, where she raises two daughters and attends meetups. She also speaks at conferences in the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia (so far). Her grandparents, James and Marti Hefley, were prolific authors; growing up, she promised herself she'd never write a book, because it is too much work. Instead, she blogs and tweets with such enthusiasm that she even has a tattoo of her twitter handle (@jessitron).

Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” offers frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams do reasonable things that work. Equipped with that knowledge, they can then decide how to adapt their product development.

With her trademark practicality and humor, Johanna is the author of 18 books and hundreds of articles. Find the Pragmatic Manager, a monthly email newsletter, and her blogs at jrothman.com and createadaptablelife.com.

She is the author of these books:

• Modern Management Made Easy triad: Manage Yourself, Lead and Serve Others, Lead an Innovative Organization
• Become a Successful Consultant
• Write a Conference Proposal the Conference Wants and Accepts
• From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver (with Mark Kilby)
• Create Your Successful Agile Project
• Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization
• Predicting the Unpredictable: Pragmatic Approaches to Estimating Cost or Schedule
• Diving for Hidden Treasures: Finding The Real Value in Your Project Portfolio (with Jutta Eckstein)
• Project Portfolio Tips: Twelve Ideas for Focusing on the Work You Need to Start & Finish
• Manage Your Job Search
• Hiring Geeks That Fit
• Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, 2nd ed.
• The 2008 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
• Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby)
• Corrective Action for the Software Industry (with Denise Robitaille)

In addition, she is a contributor to:

• Center Enter Turn Sustain: Essays on Change Artistry
• Readings for Problem Solving Leadership

For fiction:

• Sometime in Winter (a novella)

Enthusiastically and intentionally dedicated to whole team quality since 2000. When not testing, I'm planning for it and trying to insert quality into every possible discussion. My strategy is to use proven and practical methodologies that help teams implement a balanced whole team approach. Testing is an activity, not a team.

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