Douglas Hoffman is an independent consultant with Software Quality Methods, LLC. He has been in the software engineering and quality assurance fields for over 25 years and now is a management consultant in strategic and tactical planning for software quality. He is past section chairman for the Santa Clara Valley Section of the American Society for Quality (ASQ), past president of the Association for Software Testing (AST), and chairman of the Silicon Valley Software Quality Association (SSQA), a 750-member task group of the ASQ. He has been a speaker at dozens of software quality conferences including BTD and has been chairman for several international conferences on software quality. Doug is certified by ASQ in Software Quality Engineering and quality management. He has earned an M.B.A. as well as an M.S. in electrical engineering and B.A. in computer science.

Although his current focus is in software test automation, his experience includes extensive consulting, teaching, managing, and engineering in the computer and software industries. He has over 15 years' experience in creating and transforming software quality and development groups, and more than 20 years of management experience. His work in corporate, quality assurance, development, manufacturing, and support organizations makes him very well-versed in technical and managerial issues in the computer industry.