Board of Directors
The AST is run by members who volunteer as a nominated and elected slate of officers.
For more information see our elections and past leadership pages.
Chris Kenst, President
Chris has been improving software quality since 2006 and is currently a Lead Automation Engineer at Promenade in Santa Monica, CA. Chris is a Writer, Speaker, Blogger at Kenst.com, and Board Member for the Association for Software Testing. He’s been a Lead Instructor for the AST-BBST courses, hosts webinars and otherwise tries to contribute to the testing community. He also created and maintains an open source list of software testing conferences and workshops. You can find him online most places @ckenst.
James Thomas, Vice President
Over the years James has had many roles in the software world including development, tech support, technical writing and testing. He’s done his share of mangement too, building teams from scratch in all of those areas. He likes testing best. Find him on Twitter as @qahiccupps and blogs at Hiccupps.
Louise Perold, Secretary
Louise is currently part of the Quality team at OutSystems in Lisbon.
Her journey with AST started in 2007 when she attended her first CAST conference in Seattle. She has since attended BBST Foundations, Bug Advocacy and Instructors, has attended multiple CAST conferences and was co-program chair of CAST in 2013.
Louise feels blessed to be inspired by this community and continues to learn and practice the craft which is why she wanted to be part of the AST board. She is currently serving as Secretary and also overseeing the Grant Committee.
Trisha Chetani, Vice President of Community
Trisha is a software tester and automation enthusiast. She assists teams in testing procedures and provides support that enables them to deliver high-quality software in Agile and DevOps environments.
For professional growth she’s always excited to attend conferences and meet-ups. She also takes an active role in the community and has been rewarded along the way with titles like Browserstack Champion and Postman Supernova. She is one of 125 Awesome Software Testers and an AWS Community Builder.
On the Association for Software Testing board she’s looking to get a ton of useful experience that will help her to look at the larger picture more and increase her prospects of a succeeding in a management position later.
Joel Montvelisky, Executive at Large
Joel has been in testing since he started as an intern while in college, back in 1998. Since then and up to now he’s done almost every testing job from junior tester, to Team Leader and Director of QA, as well as a testing Consultant and Coach.
Today he is one of the co-founders and Chief Solution Architects at PractiTest. You can read his posts on QA intelligence blog.
Originally from Costa Rica, Joel lives in Israel with his wife and 3 kids.
Dwayne Green, Vice President of Conferences and Treasurer
Dwayne is a Test Lead at 1-800 Contacts where he coaches and mentors in his primary role. He also helps the teams at 1-800 Contacts find ways that they can improve testing practices across the org. He has been testing for 15 years and has attended every CAST conference from 2014 to present. As VP of Conferences, he is excited to create great experiences for attendees looking to attend one of the best conferences focused on testing.
When not working on testing or attending conferences, Dwayne likes to spend his free time playing board games or video games. His twitter handle is @N00bTester.
Lalit Bhamare, Vice President of Education
Lalit is the Co-Founder and Chief Editor of the popular software testing magazine Tea-time with Testers. Lalit is also the co-creator of world’s leading testing survey, State of Testing. As a Vice President at the Association for Software Testing, he is looking after AST’s well-known education program. His specialties are test consulting skills, whole team testing, test management, teaching testing and providing testing related consultation to project teams.
Lalit is an international keynote speaker and has spoken at leading testing conferences worldwide. He was a Program Chair for the ConTest NYC 2020 conference. Lalit has been working as a Lead Instructor for BBST Foundations course with Association for Software Testing and have also conducted Rapid Software Testing full day trainings at his workplace. Setting up and running Testing CoPs (Community of Practice) and establishing intellectual testing culture in organisations is one of his special skills.
Through his testing magazine Tea-time with Testers, Lalit is active in his personal mission of improving the state of software testing. He does this by collaborating with leading authors, thought leaders and expert practitioners, and also by volunteering his time to help fellow testers by writing blogs and providing coaching on software testing. His dedication to the advancement of software testing has become his main hobby due to the enjoyment and satisfaction he gains from these efforts. Contact Lalit on Twitter- @Lalitbhamare or @TtimewidTesters or visit his blog.