Automation Testing

Top 28 Test Automation Engineers to Follow in 2020

By Test Guild
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Test Automation Engineer To Follow 2020

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First, how did I choose this list?

It was easy!

Everyone on this list will be speaking at the 4th annual Automation Guild conference.

I only choose the most awesome folks as speakers to share with the Guild a tip, tool, technique, or best practice to help you succeed with all your automation testing efforts. (This list would contain thousands of other worthy automation engineers that belong on such a list if I did not use this criterion)

Keep in mind—this list is not a ranking.

I value their contributions equally, so I've arranged them in alphabetical order.

Top Automation Tester to Follow

  1. Nikolay Advolodkin

Nikolay Advolodkin Headshot

Nikolay (@Nikolay_A00) is a self-driven SDET on a lifelong mission to create profound change in the IT world, is a Solution Architect at SauceLabs, and loves to code. He is also the founder of UltimateQA, where he has a bunch of highly-rated courses around automation testing.

Be sure to check out his soon-to-be-released course, Complete Selenium WebDriver with Java Bootcamp.

https://twitter.com/Nikolay_A00/status/1222030285505622017?s=20

  1. Bijoya Chatterjee

Bijoya Chatterjee headshot

Bijoya has 15 years of industry experience in the world of software quality assurance. He’s currently working as a Software QA Director, responsible for the quality of the PS4 UI at SONY PlayStation. Pretty cool gig – right?

Her experience ranges from small startups to multinational corporations. With a passion for test automation and customer advocacy, she has been a quality advocate for all her career.

Bijoya is a firm believer that with a combination of test automation at scale and continuous integration, we can find the right balance between short development cycles and “just enough” testing.

  1. João Farias

João Farias headshot

Joao (@JFThatsABug) is a hardcore test specialist who builds mechanisms for teams to move fast – through focused automation – and finds elusive bugs using social competency and deep exploration. He has worked in a variety of contexts, from small to big teams; in low-risk to regulated industries; in web, mobile, and desktop software. João writes his thoughts on quality and software development at ThatsABug.com.

  1. Noemi Ferrera

Noemi Headshot

Noemi (@TheTestLynx) is a computer scientist who is passionate about technology and testing. She has been working both developing and testing roles and has always strived for quality, automation, and tooling creation to ease the entire development process.

She has worked for multinational companies (such as IBM, Microsoft, and Dell), as well as startups in Ireland and San Francisco.

  1. Larry Goddard

Larry Goddard headshot

Larry (@lcgoddard) is a test automation architect responsible for developing organization-wide automated test strategies and frameworks. He is a member of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT (MBCS), is a co-founder of the KLASSI brand .

He also has an open-source automation framework (klassi-js) that is hosted on both NPM and Github, the framework of choice for Oxford University Press’ (OUP) QA department worldwide. He has acted as a technical advisor to a major fashion house, and as an expert witness to a leading international law firm.

https://twitter.com/lcgoddard/status/1217814084562882560?s=20

  1. Josh Grant

Josh Grant Headshot

Josh (@joshin4colours) is a test automation pro who has worked on automation in a variety of languages, frameworks and organizations. He currently focuses on helping enterprise teams succeed with test automation.

  1. Paul Grizzaffi

Paul Grizzaffi T-Shirt Headshot TestGuild

As a principal automation architect at Magenic, Paul Grizzaffi (@pgrizzaffi) is following his passion for providing technology solutions to testing, QE, and QA organizations, including automation assessments, implementations, and activities benefiting the broader testing community. An accomplished keynote speaker and writer, Paul has spoken at local and national conferences and meetings.

He is an advisor to Software Test Professionals and STPCon, as well as a member of the Industry Advisory Board of the Advanced Research Center for Software Testing and Quality Assurance (STQA) at UT Dallas, where he is a frequent guest lecturer. Paul enjoys sharing his experiences and learning from other testing professionals on his blog.

  1. Jim Hazen

Jim Hazen

Jim Hazen is a veteran of the software testing trenches. He has over thirty years of experience testing applications on the PC and Web platforms. Mr. Hazen has been involved with the startup of testing groups at multiple companies and has done consulting work for the last 19 years. He has helped clients implement tools for functional automation, performance testing and test management.

He's worked with clientele management to achieve efficiency gains and the financial benefits associated with testing. Mr. Hazen has been a speaker at STPCon, STARWest and other QA & test conferences. He is the author of the book Before the Code: First Steps to Automation in Testing.

  1. Angie Jones

Angie Jones

Angie Jones (@techgirl1908) is a senior developer advocate who specializes in test automation strategies and techniques. She is also the Director of Test Automation University at Applitools. She shares her wealth of knowledge by speaking and teaching at software conferences all over the world.

No list would be complete without Angie, who is one of the most respected and sort after speaker/ thought leaders in our industry.

https://twitter.com/techgirl1908/status/1134451364833050625?s=20

  1. Rex Jones II

Rex Jones 11 Headshot

Rex (@RexJonesII) is an author, trainer, and consultant. He has a passion for sharing knowledge about testing software. His background is in development, but he enjoys testing applications.

Rex recently created Selenium 4 Beginners, a social network that demonstrates Selenium, Java, and TestNG videos. He has also written six Programming/ Automation books covering VBScript, the programming language for QTP/UFT, Java, Selenium WebDriver, and TestNG.

  1. Ali Khalid

Ali Khalid

Ali (@aali_khalid) is a frequent speaker on podcasts, and at conferences, and meetups. He also writes for a number of magazines and other publications, and trains folks on automation framework design.

He is currently working on Emirates Airlines’ IT transformation project, where he is helping to oversee the creation of software quality processes and structures.

Ali spends most of his time embedding quality practices across the enterprise and learning challenges with different teams and how to enable them. His vision is “Redefining Software Quality”—so much so that he spends most of his free time researching and teaching automation, continuous testing and testing acumen to create the next-generation tester.

  1. Tariq King

Tariq King

Tariq King (@tariq_king) is the senior director and engineering fellow for quality and performance at Ultimate Software. With more than fifteen years’ experience in software testing research and practice, Tariq heads Ultimate Software’s quality program by providing technical and people leadership, strategic direction, staff training, and research and development in software quality and testing practices.

Tariq is a frequent presenter at conferences and workshops, has published more than thirty research articles in IEEE- and ACM-sponsored journals, and has developed and taught software testing courses in both industry and academia.

His primary research interest is engineering autonomous self-testing systems. He is a co-founder (with Jason Arbon) of the Artificial Intelligence for Software Testing Association.

  1. Eran Kinsbruner

Eran Kinsbruner

Eran Kinsbruner (@ek121268) is the chief evangelist at Perfecto (a Perforce company), and author of The Digital Quality Handbook and Continuous Testing for DevOps Professionals, as well as a monthly columnist at the Enterprisers Project.

He is a software engineering professional with nearly twenty years of experience at companies such as Matrix, Sun Microsystems, General Electric, Texas Instruments, and NeuStar.

He holds various industry certifications from ISTQB, CMMI, and others. Eran is a recognized mobile- and web-testing influencer and thought leader, as well as an experienced speaker at major software engineering conferences. He is also a patent-holding inventor for a test exclusion automated mechanism for mobile J2ME testing, public speaker, researcher and blogger.

  1. Andrew Knight

Andy Knight

Andy Knight (@AutomationPanda) is the “Automation Panda”—an engineer, consultant, and international speaker who loves all things software. He specializes in building robust test automation solutions from the ground up. He currently works at PrecisionLender in Cary, NC.

  1. Viktoriia Kuznetcova

Viktoriia

Viktoriia (@miss_hali) is what I like to call a testing unicorn, in that she is an expert in both functional automation and performance testing.

Viktoriia has worked in software testing for over 15 years, doing both manual and automated functional testing for a variety of applications and tech stacks.

In the last five years, she's been working mainly as a full-stack performance engineer who is responsible for everything performance-related, from architecture reviews and test data design, all the way through to test execution, bottleneck analysis, and performance tuning.

Viktoriia is passionate about structured exploratory testing in all contexts, including performance testing. She believes in supporting manual testing by automation on all stages, from test environment setup and test data generation to results analysis, thus leaving the most fun part—exploration—to humans.

  1. Rhian Lewis

rhian-lewis

Rhian (@rhian_is) is one of the few folks I know who genuinely understands the testing of blockchain applications.

Rhian is a contract test automation specialist who has worked on projects for some of Europe's largest financial, leisure and automotive brands.

She is also a co-developer of the cryptocurrency portfolio tracker countmycrypto.com, which she developed with her friend Bruce Thomas in 2014.

She works as an independent blockchain consultant and runs the London Women in Bitcoin meetup group. She is a regular speaker on all things related to blockchain technology and runs training workshops for testers who are interested in this exciting and rapidly growing area.

  1. Satyajit Malugu

Satyajit headshot

Satyajit (@malugu) is a test automation engineer with more than ten years of experience. He specializes in Android and iOS mobile test automation, and has helped companies, including Urbanspoon, GoDaddy, and SoFi plan and execute on mobile test strategy.

He is eager to learn and to share his knowledge as a speaker at industry testing conferences.

https://twitter.com/malugu/status/994709524031275008?s=20

  1. Jan Molak

Jan Molak Headshot

Jan Molak (@JanMolak) is an international speaker, consultant, trainer, and full-stack developer specializing in continuous delivery, and all the aspects of the software delivery process that help make it happen.

Jan is the author of Serenity/JS, Jenkins Build Monitor, and other open-source projects, helping thousands of companies worldwide keep their builds green and their delivery process smooth.

  1. Sudhrity Mondal

Sudhrity

Sudhrity is the Director of Sales Engineering at Testim.io

  1. Guljeet Nagpaul

Guljeet Headshot

Guljeet (@ACCELQ) is an accomplished leader with experience ranging from software engineering to leading platform and market strategy. Guljeet spent ten years at Mercury where he was North America head for ALM practice. During this time, ALM captured the highest market share and Mercury was acquired by HP.

He was a key leader in growing the ALM portfolio with SPI Dynamics and Shunra acquisitions, among others.

Guljeet believes accelQ is the most significant breakthrough in continuous testing since the introduction of specialist ALM tools by Mercury. Guljeet leads product strategy and marketing. He holds a Masters in Management of Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University.

  1. Raghav Pal

Raghav Pal

Raghav (@AutomationSbS) began his career as a developer, but found he enjoyed automation more. He is currently an automation test architect with over nine years of experience in automation, testing, dev-ops and CI.

He is the founder and educator of a YouTube channel called Automation Step by Step that has over 596 videos and 150,000 subscribers. He also blogs at automationstepbystep.

Be sure to subscribe to his YouTube channel, as he posts weekly videos on numerous automation techniques and frameworks like Selenium, SoapUI, JMeter, Jenkins, Postman, Git, Katalon Studio, Robot, and others.

  1. Greg Paskal

Greg Paskal

Greg Paskal (@GregPaskal) is a natural innovator who pioneers new approaches across the quality assurance and test automation landscapes.

Greg enjoys mentoring others to excel as craftsmen of manual and automated testing. He is the author of Test Automation in the Real World and countless technical publications.

He is also the creator of METS, the Minimal Essential Testing Strategy. His approach is recognized and taught by ASTQB as an effective, manual testing strategy.

Greg is also a speaker at numerous conferences, including Automation Guild, StarEast, StarWest, and QA Trailblazers. Greg founded the Open Test Technology Forum, encouraging collaboration and focusing on greater quality across the SDLC.

  1. Corina Pip

Corina Pip headshot

Corina (@imalittletester) is a test and automation leading expert, with a focus on testing using Java, Selenium, TestNG, Spring, Maven, and other cool frameworks and tools.

Previous endeavors from her 10-plus year testing career include working on navigation devices and in the online gaming industry. She currently works in the aviation-focused software industry.

  1. Alan Richardson

Evil Tester Headshot

Alan (@eviltester) has more than twenty years of professional IT experience working as a programmer and at every level of the testing hierarchy, from tester to head of testing.

He is the author of the books Selenium Simplified and Java for Testers.

Alan also has created online training courses to help people learn technical Web testing and Selenium WebDriver with Java.

He works as an independent consultant, helping companies improve their use of automation, Agile, and exploratory technical testing.

  1. Gaurav Singh

Gaurav Singh Headshot

Gaurav (@automationhacks) is a test automation engineer by profession. Passionate about learning new technologies/languages. Currently dabbling in Kotlin/Java, API, and mobile automation.

  1. Praveen Umanath

Praveen_Umanath

Praveen (@praveen1981) currently leads Marketing at BrowserStack Inc. He has 15+ years of experience as a developer, product manager, and marketer. Praveen started building dynamic web apps in the early days of the web, when Netscape and Internet Explorer were the leading browsers, and before the days of jQuery. Over the last few years, Praveen has worked extensively with global Dev and QA teams to build developer tools that help ship quality software.

  1. Ben Johnson Ward

Ben Ward Headshot

Ben is a Principal Presales Consultant at Broadcom Inc.

  1. Michelle Xie

Michelle Xie

Michelle is an automation developer with over ten years of professional experience. She began her career working as a Java web application developer and software engineer. Later, she discovered her passion—automation testing and DevOps. She’s worked in automated installation, automated testing (API, UI, layout, etc.), automated code release/delivery pipeline, and QA tools development. Michelle also loves to provide support and share her automation test story with different technical communities.

Automation Guild 2020 Lineup

Don’t Miss Out on Automation Guild 2020

That’s my list of the top 28 automation experts to follow in 2020.

What do you think?

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to ask these speakers your most pressing automation testing question at this year’s Automation Guild.

Register now!

  1. As its so hard to follow so many bloggers who write once in a while, I prefer to follow the Ministry of Testing Blogs RSS aggregator feed.
    So – I hope all the writers above have added their blog RSS to the list.
    @halperinko – Kobi Halperin

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