Mark Mydland is a Group Manager for the Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers product at Microsoft.  In the past 12 years, Mark has worked as a developer and consultant across a wide variety of applications and industries.  Mark first joined Microsoft in 2001 working as a member of the Natural Interactive Services Division (NISD).  During his time in that group, Mark was the development manager for a team focused on analytics for assessing the efficacy of natural language interpreters with a particular emphasis on driving authoring simplification and relevance quality for user assistance.  Based on this work, Mark filed numerous patents and coauthored a paper for the SIGIR journal.  In 2004, Mark left Microsoft to work as a Director of Development at Getty Images where he led a change in process from a traditional waterfall methodology to a scrum-based agile approach which brought the release frequency from 12-18 months down to 1 month.  Since Getty made extensive use of VSTS, it seemed a natural fit for Mark to join VSTS on his return to Microsoft in 2006.  Mark received his B.S. from West Point in 1991.  He has also held positions with USWeb/marchFirst and Andersen Consulting/Accenture.