Nordic Testing Days 2026

Mr. Kari Kakkonen has worked in software testing for almost 30 years. He is the co-author of ‘ACT 2 LEAD Software Testing Leadership Handbook’ and co-winner of the ICT Influencer of the Year 2025 in Finland.
Kari is the 2021 EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award winner, the Tester of the Year in Finland Award 2021 winner, and the DASA Exemplary DevOps Instructor Award 2023 winner. He is the author and CEO of Dragons Out Oy, which created a fantasy book to teach children software testing. Kari works at Gofore as Service Owner, Customer Expertise Development, running a training business, and provides software testing, agile, DevOps, and AI training services in Europe. He has an M.Sc. from Aalto University (aalto.fi). He works mostly with agile testing, lean, test automation, DevOps, and AI.
Kari has been working in ICT consulting, training, finance, insurance, pension insurance, public sector, embedded software, telecom, gaming, and industry domains.
Kari was on the Executive Committee of ISTQB (istqb.org) 2015-2021. He is on the Board of Directors of TMMi (tmmi.org). He is the Treasurer of FiSTB (fistb.fi). He is the co-founder of FiSTB Testing Assembly, the biggest testing seminar in Finland, for which he has been a co-organizer for 10 years.
Kari is a singer, snowboarder, kayaker, husband, and dad.
Kari has given public talks and is a passionate advocate for software testing and QA. He is active on LinkedIn and welcomes you to network.