Mr. Kari Kakkonen is the 2021 EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award winner, Tester of the Year in Finland Award 2021 winner, and DASA Exemplary DevOps Instructor Award 2023 winner. He is the author and CEO of Dragons Out Oy, creating a fantasy book to teach software testing to children. Kari Kakkonen is working in Finland at Knowit. He has M.Sc. in from Aalto University (aalto.fi). He works mostly with agile testing, lean, test automation, DevOps and AI.

Kari has 25 years of testing experience, 15 years of agile experience, 10 years of DevOps experience and 5 years of AI experience. He’s been working in ICT consulting, training, finance, insurance, pension insurance, public sector, embedded software, telecom, gaming, and industry domains.

Kari was on Executive of ISTQB (istqb.org) 2015-2021. He is on Board of Directors of TMMi. He is Treasurer of FiSTB (fistb.fi).

Kari is a singer, snowboarder, kayaker, husband and dad.