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STeP-IN is India’s first and most comprehensive forum exclusively focused on Software Testing. STeP-IN Forum has played a pioneering role in shaping the evolution of Software Testing in India. The numbers reveal the true story!

STeP-IN Forum has benefited more than 50,000 test professionals, managers, architects, Vice Presidents and CXOs through a variety of conferences, tutorials, evening talks and webinars. Over the years, STeP-IN has produced a dozen software testing conferences and 9 themed events across different locations in India. The Annual STeP-IN SUMMIT has grown to be one of the largest Testing Conferences in the Asia-Pacific Region.

STeP-IN Forum

STeP-IN, the Forum for Software Testing Practitioners came into being in October 2003 at Bangalore. STeP-IN‚ registered under Section 25 of the Companies Act, operates on a Non-Profit basis.

Our Core Committee Members

Steering Committee

Raj Neravati

Vipul Kocher

President-ITB, Director-Verity Software, Co-Founder-SALT

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Vipul Kocher

President-ITB, Director-Verity Software, Co-Founder-SALT

Vipul is a co-founder of SALT and Verity software and President of Indian Testing Board, the ISTQB board for India. Prior to that he co-founded and ran PureTesting, a very successful testing services company. He has over 20 years of testing experience including managing Adobe Reader testing.

He has worked for a number of reputed companies such as Adobe Systems, Aplion Networks and River Run Software Group. He has managed testing for various award-winning products such as Adobe Reader for multiple platforms, routers and network management products, mail and database access products for mobile devices and desktops amongst others.

He has won several awards including the best paper award at STAREast 2006 and the Logica CMG Triple Star Award for the most original contribution at EuroStar 2005. He has been a Keynote speaker at many testing conferences in the USA, Europe, Asia and Australia-New Zealand. He has been a contributor to the ISTQB FL and AL syllabi as well.

Vipul invented Q-Patterns, a method of capturing testing knowledge and writing reusable test cases. This method is being used by various organizations across the world. He is also the inventor of extension to Noun-and-Verb technique for creation of large number of tests from minimal documentation in shortest time possible.

He holds a Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering and Masters Degree in Computer Engineering from IIT, Delhi.

You can contact Vipul at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Raj Neravati

Vinay Baid

STeP-IN Vice Convener, Co-Founder - Verity Software

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Raj Neravati

Vivek Mathur

General Manager, Mindtree Limited. & President, STeP-IN Forum

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Vivek Mathur

General Manager, Mindtree Limited. & President, STeP-IN Forum

Vivek has 25+ years of varied work experience ranging from the Government to software product and service companies. His focus has always been on setting up robust processes, and seeing their impact on the quality of deliverables and productivity of the workers.

Vivek started his work journey as a part of the Indian Railways Service of Mechanical Engineering, then joined the Information Technology Sector after MBA from IIMA.

Vivek has set up core software development processes for product and service companies like McAfee and Intelligroup, and has led large delivery teams for multiple customers.

Vivek has always tried to give back to the community, and has been associated with STeP-IN Forum actively for the past 8 years.

Raj Neravati

Sundar Ganesh

Director - Head of Compliance Technology India, Barclays & Co-President, STeP-IN Forum

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Sundar Ganesh

Director - Head of Compliance Technology India, Barclays & Co-President, STeP-IN Forum

Sundar is a banking and financial information technology professional leads large global teams. Sundar specialises in software quality and is focused on enhancing customer experience. Sundar joined Barclays Technology Center, India in its inception and was instrumental in setting up its testing practice from 2007. Under his stewardship, Sundar has matured a world class testing CoE which delivers quality with agility and innovation. Currently he heads the cards testing globally.

Sundar has a track record of successful delivery of testing projects for banks and financial institutions in USA, Europe, Asia Pacific and for global 500 financial organisations such as GE, Citigroup, Standard Chartered Bank, Wipro, CNA and State Bank of India. He is very passionate about QA and a keen contributor to the IT industry and partcipates in industry forums.

Special Initiatives

Dr. Nandakumar Ramakrishnan

Heading Testing CoE & Product Owner - Platform Engineering - DevOps, ING Belgium NV/SA & Head – STeP-IN Technical Committee

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Dr. Nandakumar Ramakrishnan

Heading Testing CoE & Product Owner - Platform Engineering - DevOps, ING Belgium NV/SA & Head – STeP-IN Technical Committee

Dr. Nandakumar Ramakrishnan, a doctorate in Information Technology from Prescott University, UK works with ING Belgium NV/SA as a Product Owner -DevOps Platform and Heading Testing CoE ING BE & Chaos Engineering.

He has over 22+ years of experience in Software Quality Engineering and Information Security working for startups as well as technology giants like eBay, PayPal, Yahoo, Expedia(Hong Kong) & Colruyt Group ( Belgium). During his career, he has led pan-global test teams and functioned as individual contributor for various types of testing methodology, playing on various areas such as Test Delivery, Test Container Platform, Global Selenium Grid ,Chaos Engineering, Security Test Architectural Solution, Tool Development, Testing Automation Framework Design and Solution, Security Assessment, Security Chaos Engineering and PCI-DSS & BS 7799 Compliance, Accessibility based on Section 508 and Cloud computing. He is also expert in Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Lean & CMMi/TMMi and also introduced Security Assessment Scrum Process.

He contributes as a Head of Technical Committee at the Step-In Forum. He also has been core reviewer for various STeP-IN Conference CFP from 2008 to till date on various themes on Testing, Agile, DevOps and Security. He was also Panelist for Global Accessibility Event & World Software QA Summit. He also presented on various forums such as World Software Testing Summit on Test Container Platform- Cloud Containerized Continuous Testing , Agile and DevOps conference Belgium on GDPR-Continuous Testing, Chaos Engineering – Split-brain, ISQT 2008, Silicon India Java Conference, Techshare, Tech-Gig & Step-In Webinar Series He has won CX Day Innovation Award, eBay Quality Awards in H1 ,H2 2012 & H1 2013,CX Innovation 2021, Hackathon Spot award, as well as two Yahoo! Odyssey awards for security & innovation.

Nikhil Bhandari

Head – Community Engagement & Social Media Strategy QA Manager, Lithium Technologies

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Nikhil Bhandari

Head – Community Engagement & Social Media Strategy QA Manager, Lithium Technologies

Nikhil Bhandari has more than 15+ years of experience in Test Engineering and Tools Development area. He is currently working as QA Manager at LITHIUM Technologies where he is heading the QA organization at their newly opened center in Bangalore. Previous to Lithium, he worked with VISA, where he led tools/framework team for Digital & Mobile group. His team built unified test automation framework for the dev & test engineers to simplify automation of business flows, increase productivity and define quality gates. Prior to that, Nikhil had multiple roles at INTUIT over 9+ years leading QA teams for TurboTax, Mint and QuickBooks Online. Before Intuit, Nikhil worked at Oracle, McAfee and Satyam. Nikhil has a Bachelor of Engineering degree and currently doing his Executive Management program from IIM Bangalore.

Nikhil has presented papers in many conferences across the globe. He is associated with STeP-IN in various roles for past 6+ years and is integral part of Tech Review Panel.

Smita Kelkar

Associate Manager – System Test and Automation at Siemens Industry Software India Pvt Ltd

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Smita Kelkar

Associate Manager – System Test and Automation at Siemens Industry Software India Pvt Ltd

Smita works at Siemens Industry Software (I) Pvt .Ltd as an Associate Manager – System Test and Automation. Her overall experience of 19 years in IT industry expands to multiple profiles such as program management, release management, build and configuration management. She has handled various testing assignments including manual, performance and automation testing. In her past experience, she has been the Scrum-master for agile implementations. Apart from being an IT veteran, she takes keen interest in Travel, Photography and Theatre .She is a certified Ornithologist and feels her whistling skill takes her close to nature. Smita takes pride in knowledge delivery, loves to do it and is skilled to teach Software topics. An avid life lover, Smita would delve into social assignments that make her happy and keep energized!

Chapter Chairs

Anuradha Biswas

Chapter Chair, STeP-IN-Bangalore

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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 & Chapter Chair, STeP-IN-Chennai

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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.

LRV Ramana

Lead Consultant - Quality Engineering, QualiZeal & Chapter Chair, STeP-IN-Hyderabad

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LRV Ramana

Lead Consultant - Quality Engineering, QualiZeal

LRV Ramana has been driving “Quality Consciousness” by implementing large QA transformation initiatives in distinct roles across enterprises. Being ambidextrous, LRV is equally competent with leading large strategic growth initiatives, business development, delivery & operations while possessing expertise in designing and implementing technical solution accelerators.

Inspired by Google’s concept of Engineering Productivity he has front ended broad scale adoption of Quality Engineering Practices that transform Quality Engineering LOB into a profit center.

LRV is currently placed at 17th position in TestAutomation University's world's Top 100 list. He has been a regular speaker in leading Software Testing Conferences for more than a decade and has featured on different software magazines published globally. He is a strong believer that software test engineering is at the cusp of a massive disruption and the best opportunities present themselves to engineers who take the steps to become conversant with principles and practices of Quality Engineering.

Vasantha Priya

Tata Consultancy Services & Chapter Chair, STeP-IN-Pune

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Vasantha Priya

Tata Consultancy Services

28+ years of experience in IT industry, cutting across various industry, contributing in various roles. Using the industry experience, contributing back through many patents and copyrights. Currently Product owner of Digitate ignio AI.Assurance, an autonomous assurance product that enabled enterprises to deliver better software faster

Rahul Vishwaroop

Senior Quality Engineering Manager at Adobe & Chapter Chair, STeP-IN-Noida

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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

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