The principal consultant of Excelon Development, Matt Heusser is a technologist for hire, with expertise in project management, development, writing, systems improvement, and, yes, software testing.

In 2006, Matt served as lead organizer for the initial Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference, a regional event that continues today. Two years later he led the organization for the Agile-Alliance Sponsored Workshop on the Technical Debt Metaphor, and recently published a leading position paper on the subject as a cover story in Better Software Magazine. About that time Matt transitioned to work as a QA lead for Socialtext, where he worked with a leading product company for three years. The test strategies developed at Socialtext led to a case study in Beautiful Testing by O’Reilly (2009), a presentation by Chris McMahon at the Agile Conference, and inspired an open-source test framework, Selenesse.

Matt sits on the board of directors for the Association for Software Testing, is a contributing editor to Software Test and Quality Assurance Magazine, and frequently writes for other publications like SoftwareDevelopmentConnection.com SearchSoftwareQuality.com, and Informit.com. A member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, Matt is probably best known as a lead editor for How to Reduce the Cost of Software Testing (Taylor and Francis, 2011). You can read more about Matt’s writing on his publications page.

In 2010 Matt was selected to participate in the American Society for Quality’s “Influential Voices” program, a national-level spotlight program, and his blogs (he has several) are consistently ranked in top ratings for software testing, agile development, and development management.

You can often find Matt at software testing conferences; he has presented at Google’s Test Automation Conference (and there’s video!) along with multiple presentations at STAREast, the Software Test Professionals conference, the Better Software Conference, and many more. Matt got his teaching experience the hard way: Presenting to undergraduates at Calvin College, where he served a two-year term as a part-time instructor at night, while developing computer software during the day.

After nearly fifteen years of genuine dedication to the profession, Matt took Excelon Development full time in the summer of 2011.