SUMMARY:

• A consummate business professional with an outstanding track record in the areas of Quality Engineering/Assurance and Technical Management.
• Overarching expertise in implementing strategies that increase quality of user experience, quality of software, and allow feedback from customers to get incorporated into future products.
• A sought - after internal business partner capable of uniting and motivating project managers, developers, product managers, QA managers and Customer Support to ensure outstanding business results.
• Skilled in all phases of project management with strong acumen in risk identification, mitigation, and elimination.
• Leverages insights to reduce operational costs and increase productivity by automating processes and test plans using scripts, check lists, and knowledge sharing databases.
• Fosters an environment of efficiency and effectiveness that flows through directly to the bottom-line.

TECHNICAL SKILLS:

Linux, Unix, Windows, Windows Server, Alfresco, C++, Cognos Reports (QRep), HTML, Crystal Reports, HP Quality Center, JIRA, MS-Access, Perl script, PHP script, Unix script, Visual Basic, Dreamweaver, Kentico CMS, Lotus Notes, MS-Excel, MS-Outlook, MS-PowerPoint, MS-Project, MS-Project Server, MS-Visio, MS-Word, MS-SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, Selenium IDE, Selenium Web Driver, SharePoint, Primavera, Mercury Test Director, Mercury Load Runner, WS-FTP

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

Confidential, Alpharetta, GA

DIRECTOR, QUALITY ENGINEERING

• While at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, developed multi-year plan for using current capabilities of the User Acceptance Team as well as expanding their skills and capability to meet the ever-growing needs of the company (new acquisitions, new product launches, and new features on existing products).
• Improved overall quality of software through User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
• Developed voiceover script and presentation used to create 4-minute video overview of team functions
• Implemented on-boarding program that got new hires access to the building, the network, and their hardware on day one of employment
• Used a sub-set of testing team to perform dual tasks of manually testing application and creating automation scripts (using Selenium Web Driver) to allow future regression testing of basic features. Once the script creation was complete, most of the tester’s time could then be used to manually test the new features while full regression testing took less than 30 minutes.
• Maintained metrics to determine priority of applications that would have their testing automated with priority given to applications in production and verified during the periodic Disaster Recovery exercises.
• Worked with team to recycle their scripting code and use other methods to generate scripts faster
• Worked with Project Managers, Developers, Product Managers, QA Managers, and Customer Support to ensure defects found late in testing process (or by customers once released to production) are addressed in future releases.
• Balanced the technical and non-technical aspects of the job to ensure employees were engaged and challenged but not overwhelmed
• Created process to incorporate the existing processes and defect tracking of a newly acquired company into our existing methods.
• Received Manager of the Quarter award for making it possible for the team to be successful despite all of the on-going changes in process and the constant need to automate & innovate.

Confidential, Alpharetta, GA

QUALITY ASSURANCE

• At Ford, responsible for creating the test environment for each new software release, developing and ensuring all software implementation procedures were followed, ensure all critical issues were documented and their resolutions passed testing procedures, as well as provide timelines for going into production. Maintained positive relationships with the software developers, clients, DBA team, system administrators, desktop support team, and the managers of each department.
• Provided change control process on software patches to ensure production maintained a 98% uptime
• Gathered and tracked client requirements for future software features and updates
• Received Systems Excellence award and Customer Driven Quality award for perfect execution of the new application and rapid response to client issues.
• At FedEx, updates to the internally used billing application (CHRONOS) were needed on a periodic basis. CHRONOS is used to track packages and correctly bill clients. However, the resources used for testing the next version of the application (currently under the testing phase of development) were also needed to test software patches to keep production running.
• Used resource leveling to schedule members from test team to verify software patches before putting going into production
• Managed resources for all pre-production testing
• Reported success/failure of all testing pre-production and post-production
• Managed by milestones and ensured critical dates were met
• Ensured compliance with standard testing techniques by all team members
• Received FedEX WRCS Excellence award for consistently improving the quality of software changes allowed into production
• At CH2M Hill, created a scheduled script that downloaded PDF documents from the web site of a third-party vendor, group the documents by category and then upload each category into a searchable document repository. The result was 1.2 millon documents of various sizes (maps, records, citations, permits, etc) were loaded into the system in 3 months.
• Created a data dictionary of the database used by the document management system (OptiView) to generate reports regarding the number of documents in the system by department for specific time periods. This was used to ensure each department complied with moving their information into the new system.

Confidential, Alpharetta, GA

TECHNICAL MANAGER / QA MANAGER

• The staff was split into two groups with overlapping schedules to cover the client’s heaviest work hours
• Championed the paradigm shift of incorporating best practices to increase the team’s overall productivity using individual/team metrics to measure the effectiveness of each process change
• Created ad hoc reports to support business needs and show progress toward business objectives
• Increased overall morale by quickly addressing long standing issues within the team
• Reduced the backlog of 2400 open tickets by 50% in four months
• Also at Convergys, designed a new web application for internal use then lead an international team of programmers that developed and implemented the design. This application reduced operational costs of testing new cell phone features from approximately $48,000 annually to approximately $8,400 annually while at the same time reducing time needed to generate a page of test data from 10 hours to 15 minutes.
• Implemented an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). This allowed new team members the ability to search the database of job aids while assisting the client. Using this practice, with the addition of pairing new team members with seasoned team members, reduced the learning curve of new team members by 50%, increased the team’s overall productivity by 30%, and ensured the client received the same consistent information regardless of team member working their issue.
• Created a detailed document of the test environment’s infrastructure (gateway servers, database servers, application servers, running services, and configuration files). Using a set of UNIX scripts, the environment could be quickly verified to determine if the latest version of the software was installed correctly and if all services were running correctly. This reduced the time needed to train new staff members.