Anuradha Biswas

President & CEO, Prakat Solutions & Chapter Chair, STeP-IN-Bangalore

Anuradha is the President & CEO of Prakat Solutions, a company she founded along with a few fellow Software Industry veterans in December 2009. Prakat Solutions specializes in end to end engineering solutions including - Product Engineering, Test Engineering, Accessibility Engineering & Application Modernization.

Prior to this, she worked with global organizations like Verifone, Cybercash, CA and Aztecsoft (acquired by MindTree) & Infosys. She was instrumental in building the Software Testing business ground up at CA & Aztec. At Infosys, she was part of the leadership who grew a strong Business unit in Independent Software validation from concept to over 8000 people & 450 million USD. She has extensive experience in organization building, service portfolio creation, business planning, enabling the sales force, global service delivery teams & skills development etc.

Under her leadership, Prakat was named in the SI-1OO list of the top 100 Indian owned technology companies by Silicon India in 2010 & was the winner of the Best Startup in the Services category at StartupCity 2010. With its primary Engineering centre in Bengaluru, India, Prakat is headquartered in Fort Worth and has offices in New York & Denver. The teams she built has strong domain competencies in FinTech, AgriTech, EduTech, Telecom, Retail, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Legal and IT Infrastructure.

Learnings from her mentors & varied experiences of life have helped Anuradha build a keen business sense & a sharp acumen, which she effectively uses to inspire younger professionals & budding entrepreneurs attain their full potential.

Though her interests are diverse, she has channelled her focus & effort to:

• Building Inclusive Technology & Work force – GAAD, Temple Grandin – Cultivating a Neurodiverse workplace, Autism Hackathon Event – Conducted at Innovation Pavilion, Denver – Sponsors of the event, SAP Autism at Work @ Philadelphia – Neurodiversity event and Community partner to Fintech Connector, an exclusive online membership community that connects local fintech entrepreneurs and start-ups with global professionals, thought leaders, and investors
• Motivating women in Corporates – Gracehopper - Celebration of Women in Computing, Canada-India Business Women’s Forum - INDO Supplier Diversity Mission, Sobha Developers – keynote speaker, Intuit – women’s day
• Academia – Tech Talks @ Periyar Maniammai University, was on the advisory board of the KSR College of Engineering, first train-the-trainer program at Bharathiar University, the Vishnu Education Society - Bhimavaram – Innovation centre around disabilities, Keynote Speaker @ APS College of engineering
• Contributions to Technology forums – StepIN (tech talks, panel discussions, advisory board member), Intuit – Accessibility week – Speaker & DELL – Cloud Testing

Sunil Peter

Sr. Manager & Head of Process Methods & Tools (PMT) at Maveric Systems

Sunil is an experienced Technology & Business Process Leader with multicultural background of 15 years’ experience in the areas of Business Quality Management Consulting, Process Architect for Cross functional processes & ERP automation, Coach, Trainer for change management. He is an expert in adapting global models such as SEI-CMMI, Agile, Scrum, SAFe, ISO, PSM, EFQM, TMMI & TMAP to benchmark and improve Service Delivery & Operations Excellence for internal & external clients.

Sunil has delivered various projects across various industry verticals like Defence/Aerospace, FMCG, Telecom, BSFSI, Travel & Transportation, spanning across APAC, Middle East, North Africa, US & UK. This gives him great understanding of the delivery challenges faced in multicultural settings & trouble shoots effectively.

He currently heads the corporate quality (PMT function) at Maveric & plays the additional role of Chief info sec officer.

He is a certified SAFe Agilist, CSP, CSPO, CSM, CMMI ATM, Green Belt.

He is a student of theology & philosophy. Loves traveling, meeting people & works for social causes.

Kalilur Rahman

Head - IT, QA & Testing at Novartis

Kalilur Rahman is a Head of IT – Testing and Quality at Novartis, handling Test Delivery operations for Commercial IT unit. Before Novartis, Kalilur was a Senior Manager / Vice President – Communications, Media and Technology practice aligned to Testing Capability

Vasantha Priya

Tata Consultancy Services

Vasantha Priya popularly known as Priya, comes with 25 years of industry experience comprising of

• Setup captive test centres for British multinational banking and financial services holding company and a British multinational groceries and general merchandise retailer
• Worked with multiple Products – Garmex, API, TABS, VisionPLUS
• Designed, developed, tested and implemented the products for various customers
• Executed various Test Consulting assignments
• Managed Specialised testing service (Innovation centre) comprising of automation & performance across all business verticals for 2+ years
• Managed various large/medium/small projects and accounts
• Vertical management such as Energy, Resource, Utilities and Banking, Financial Services for assurance bring consistent growth
• ~24% revenue growth Y-o-Y from FY14 till FY 17 with operating margin of ~45%
• Managed max. 130 MUSD assurance business
• Generated ~50 MUSD sales bring vertical growth of ~36% Y-o-Y FY12 & FY13

She has created / co-created various Intellectual Property and Copyright tools and assets in Assurance industry like

• Built 7000+ Test Suite Repository for Vision Plus Product for Cards
• IP created for Test Automation Framework (ITAA)
• IP for TCS Test Process Assessment Maturity model 
• Copyright on Testing Service Catalogue
• Working on Intelligent Assurance product to suit digital & AI era and agile way of working

She is a Certified Professional Scrum Master (PSM1) and has been implementing right process

• Ensured testing projects adheres to Quality standards like TMMi, CMM and ISO standards.
• Represented organization for external CMM assessment for testing practice
• An Agile Ninja Coach of TCS, ensuring agile way of working

Being a Certificate holder of “Cultivating a Winner's Mindset” from Institute for Personal Leadership, she cultivate right mentoring

• Created and Conducted training for 2000+ associates in Test Automation and Performance Testing
• Mentored and groomed many testing professionals through the career
• Delivered various training programs – Fresher’s to Senior leadership
• Participates in recruitment activities
• Involves in Competency development of associates

She holds a Master Degree in Computer Science from Bharathidasan University. She loves travelling, gardening and interacts with NGOs.

Rahul Vishwaroop

Senior Quality Engineering Manager at Adobe

As the Lead Quality Manager for Adobe InDesign, he is responsible for ensuring timely and quality release for this flagship desktop and digital publishing product. The team is distributed across India, US, Japan and China. In collaboration with a team of managers, he oversee the progress of the product and have devised measures to quantitatively monitor progress and success. We have formulated processes that have helped testing become agile and optimal.

Link: www.linkedin.com/in/rahul-vishwaroop-9052b4

Abhilasha Vyas

Director, OpenText & Chapter Chair, STeP-IN-Bangalore

Working as a Director with Sapient, Abhilasha is currently playing the role of Sapient Global Markets QA Domain Lead having 13+ years of experience. She has rich experience of designing and implementing functional and automation test strategies & solutions for complex projects. Over the last decade, she has worked extensively on finance domain projects playing various roles ranging from BA, QA strategist and PM across custom and product (Calypso) implementation. Additionally, as a part of her current profile she works with clients to understand their needs and provide an optimal QA solution, provide strategic support to new and complex engagements, collaborate with teams to define standards/ best practices, design / manage training programs and conduct research on the trends in the Industry. Additionally, she also leads one of the tracks in WLN (Women Leadership network) at Sapient primarily to mentor and grow more women in Technology.

Balamurali Lakshmanan

Director- Quality & Testing Group, NeST IT & Chapter Chair, STeP-IN-Trivandrum

Balamurali is currently heading the Quality and Testing Group of NeST Information Technologies. He is responsible for setting the standards and methodology for process quality and testing, including framework for assessing benefits and risks for the organization. He is an M.Tech Post Graduate from IIT Kanpur with more than 18 years of experience in IT industry. He has extensive hands on experience in designing QA Strategies including design & implementation of Quality and Testing Processes & Methodologies, KPI & Metrics management. He engages with practitioners making them understand the implications of process quality and testing. He ensures adherence to organization defined standards and good practice in the development, systems testing and quality assurance arena. Has played a lead role in implementing the models like CMMI ML5 Dev V1.3, ISO9001:2015, Automotive SPICE, ISO 27001, IEC61508, ISO 13485, TL9000 and ISO 26262, TS16949 in the organization.

He also plays an active role in the core group of the Trivandrum chapter of Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN). Product quality is his aspiration and continuously pushes for quality-oriented practices across people and organizations through such kind of public groups. Teaching and talent sharing has always been his passion and has conducted many public workshops and corporate trainings on Software Engineering, Quality Models and Testing Process and Techniques. He has marked presence in various International Conferences like QAI, STC, and ISQT by presenting papers in concepts of CMMI High Maturity, Software Testing and Automation, Quality Assurance etc.