Bala Lakshminarayan

Fremont, CA aculw7@r.postjobfree.com 510-***-****

http://www.linkedin.com/in/balalakshminarayan

Summary

Experienced Agile Coach, Scrum master and an Engineering professional with strengths in Portfolio, Program and Team level management.

Conducted Enterprise wide hands-on coaching for multiple cross-functional distributed teams on Agile framework and all aspects of Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban and XP.

Helped teams become high performing by leading by example, and demonstrating effective agile techniques to technical team members, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Dev-Ops, functional manager and their executives

Actively worked with individuals ranging from executives to individual contributors in their agile adoption journey. Conducted Agile assessments quarterly and shared results.

Delivered several classroom format training for teams on Agile, Scrum Master and Product Owner skills.

Demonstrated Leadership skills in coaching cross-functional teams on technical subjects through business value based analysis for “Agile Adoption”.

Excellent communication and partnership skills in influencing key stakeholders and customers across organization.

Designed and Delivered Agile Rollout plans for successful adoption.

Certified Scrum Master(CSM), Certified Scrum Professional (CSP) www.scrumalliance.org, SAFe Agilist (SA), SAFe Program Consultant (SPC4) www.scaledagileacademy.com

Career Achievements

Agile Coach/Scrum Master: 7 years of experience as an Agile Coach and hands on Scrum Master. Helped teams transition from Waterfall to Agile methodologies. Performed Backlog Grooming, Sprint Pre-planning, Capacity Planning, Tasking, Sprint Planning, Retrospectives. Co-ordinated Product releases, deployment on SaaS environments. Developed and Implemented a Novel User Acceptance Testing (UAT) as an agile process which resulted in significant quality improvements in Company releases. Developed, trained product teams on Agile User Acceptance test processes. Helped create Agile Knowledge Base Intranet Website. Wrote a paper on Agile User Acceptance testing, which was published in July 2013 in www.scrumalliance.org

Director/Manager of Quality Engineering: 14 years of experience in testing, building and managing QA teams, both Onshore/Offshore, globally distributed (up to 34 + QA engineers) in well-known Silicon Valley companies. As a “hands on’ technical QA director, built automation frame works (QTP, Selenium), and Load testing (Loadrunner) and other commercial and open source QA tools. Successfully delivered automation of products reducing QA cycle time and increased test coverage. Showed consistent efficiency and productivity in QA deliverables by effective use of onshore/offshore test resources. Provided base and calculated QA metrics, and projected quality trends for current, future needs for QA group.

Technical Skills

Languages: C, Java, PL/SQL, VB Script, XML, HTML, J2EE, UM, .NET.

Agile Tools: JIRA, VersionOne, TFS and Rally – Related Plugins

Test Tools: Selenium, Quick Test Professional (QTP), Silk test, Winrunner, Optimizeit, Junit, Cobertura, JMeter, Loadrunner, SiteScope, SOAPUI, IBM Appscan Security, Wireshark.

ERP:SAP R/3 (Production Planning, Materials Mgmt, Finance, Sales & Distribution).

RDBMS:Certified Oracle DBA. Oracle 11g (UTF8), SQL Server (UCS2), MySQL, DB-2.

SCM Tools: Install Shield, Visual Source Safe, Clearcase, Installanywhere, Ant, Maven, Pulse, Perforce, Subversion, Hudson, Jenkins.

Relevant Experience

Xerox Inc (CA-MMIS), West Sacramento, CA Oct 2015-Present

Served as the Senior Agile Coach for CA-MMIS Health Enterprise System Replacement

project for 20+ Agile Scrum Teams in a SAFe ™ Agile environment. Provided Agile

Leadership for 20+ Scrum Masters and Scrum Teams.

Coached Scrum Teams and Scrum Masters on improving their Agile Practices in Daily

Standups, Backlog Refinement, Sprint Planning, Sprint Reviews/Demos and in conducting

better Retrospectives.

Performed Release Planning and Execution involving multiple Scrum teams effectively

using Agile, SAFe ™ recommended processes. Launched Release trains.

Pioneered initiatives and resolved long standing issues with the State of California in

improving Agile processes, Backlog Prioritizations, Sprint Demos, Integrating Code and

improved Integration/ Build, Release processes.

Participated effectively as a member of Agile Mobilization Team and solved many Agile

process related problems. Worked effectively with Xerox, Xerox Sub-Contractors and State

Management in promptly addressing issues with Agile teams and processes.

Developed Checklists, Process document updates to address Issues and CAP’s raised by the

End Users.

Served as a Product Owner for VersionOne Scrum Tool and helped facilitate better tool

utilization/improvements.

Created and presented Sprint Agile Metrics on team’s Sprint Performance and helped

forecast Release Completion dates and schedules.

GAP IT, San Francisco, CA (Nisum, Inc) Nov 2014 – Aug 2015

As a Sr. Iterations Manager/Agile Coach (Consultant) Served as a Scrum Master for 3 Scrum Teams - eCommerce, Tools, Stores teams comprising of 8, 6 and 10 team members respectively. Also served as the Agile coach for several Nisum Scrum teams.

Performed Backlog Grooming, Sprint Pre-planning, Capacity Planning, Tasking, Sprint Planning, Resolved Impediments, Retrospectives, provided Sprint, Release Burn down, Burn up charts, Velocity calculations, Sprint Demos, Release Plans. Managed Budgets, Forecasts, Schedules for two 5+ Million$ Projects.

Prepared coaching and training materials to coach teams on Agile processes, CPI.

Developed Project health agile metrics which helped identify gaps and resulted in incremental improvement in Agile teams Velocity, reduced cycle times, and achieving ‘Green” Status from Red Status.

Worked with GAP Dev-ops teams to resolve Security issues.

Developed classroom Training curriculum on Agile/Scrum Overview, Splitting User Stories, and Roadmap planning. Developed Presentations on Agile PMO, IM On-Boarding, Agile Transformation, Distributed Agile Models.

Omnicell Inc, Mountain View, CA Feb 2014 –Nov 2014

As an Agile Governance Leader, /Scrum Master (Consultant), Coached Scrum Masters, team members, conducted Agile Governance meetings. Co-developed OmniScrum document defining Agile processes, roles and responsibilities of Agile team members.

Collaborated with Product and technology partners in leading, facilitating, and supporting product and technology planning at multiple levels.

Conducted planning sessions at strategic, roadmap, release, and sprint/iteration levels.

Worked as a Scrum master for 2 teams-Performed Backlog Grooming, Sprint Pre-planning, Capacity Planning, Tasking, Sprint Planning, Resolved Impediments, Retrospectives, provided Sprint, Release Burn down, Burn up charts, Velocity calculations, Sprint Demos, Release Plans, Defect Metrics and coordinated deployment on SaaS environments.

Developed Agile release planning events and ceremonies, and maintained an end-to-end release schedule for the program in partnership with Release Management.

Followed up on action items from Sprint Retrospectives, and Implemented SDLC Improvements such as Unit testing, Test Driven Development (TDD), and Continuous Integration.

Developed “Agile Heat Map” for teams Agile progress and provided coaching for continuous improvement

Developed classroom Training curriculum on Test Driven Development, Unit Testing, Agile/Scrum Overview, Splitting User Stories, Leader/Manager and Roadmap planning.

Ellie Mae, Inc, Pleasanton, CA 2012 – 2013

As an Agile Program Manager/Scrum Master provided leadership for 3 Scrum and Kanban Teams of Ellie Mae’s Mortgage SaaS Solutions.

Performed Backlog Grooming, Sprint Pre-planning, Capacity Planning, Tasking, Sprint Planning, Resolved Impediments, Retrospectives, provided Sprint, Release Burn down, Burn up charts, Velocity calculations, Sprint Demos, Release Plans, Defect Metrics and coordinated deployment on SaaS, AWS Cloud environments.

“Hands-on” experience in using ServiceMesh to create Windows, Linux Servers, installing, configuring applications on Amazon Cloud Services- AWS (using Bastion or Jump Server).

Worked with Dev-Ops teams to resolve Security issues.

Developed a Novel User Acceptance Testing (UAT) as an Agile process in Ellie Mae. Developed Jira/Green-hopper workflows that enabled UAT to be implemented.

Trained Product owners, SME’s on UAT. Agile UAT process resulted in significantly improving the quality of our releases.

Wrote a paper on Agile User Acceptance testing, which was published in July 2013 in www.scrumalliance.org.

Developed Agile Release plans for products, based on median velocity, and coordinated releases and SaaS Deployments.

Implemented SDLC Improvements such as Unit testing contributed to Company Agile knowledgebase Intranet website.

Developed classroom Training curriculum on Test Driven Development, Unit Testing, Agile/Scrum Overview, Leader/Manager and Roadmap planning.

Qumu, Inc, San Bruno, CA 2010 – 2012

As a QA Manager/Scrum Master, Managed Quality Assurance of Qumu Video Streaming Products and appliances (Licensed & SaaS/AWS Cloud models) with a team of 12 Onshore/Offshore Quality Engineering professionals .Helped transition the engineering team from waterfall SDLC to Agile SDLC.

Coached the teams towards “Self-Organized” and “Self-managed” teams to become highly effective and high performing teams.

Trained the team to embed “Automation” during sprints & delivered higher quality products

Served as the Scrum Master for a 3 teams of 6 and 7 team members.

Performed Backlog Grooming, Sprint Pre-planning, Capacity Planning, Tasking, Sprint Planning, Retrospectives, and coordinated deployment on SaaS environments.

Served as the Company’s Agile Coach and trained product development teams, executives, key stakeholders on Agile processes.

Delivered “Key Release Dashboard” and metrics to be used by cross functional team for product release visibility

Worked“hands-on”-installed, configured, and testedQumu applications. Used Jmeter, developed, executed load and performance testing scripts and found critical defects.Performed Mobility testing using iPad, Android tablets and phones.

Performed security scans of Qumu Software using IBM-Appscan, found significant security issues and proactively took action to get cross-scripting, SQL Injection security issues resolved.

Developed detailed QA plan for assigning resources, scheduling QA tasks in a Agile development environment for Qumu Video J2EE Software/appliances – Portal,Video Edge CDN, QCS Encoders.

Developed Automation framework based on Selenium/QTP from ground-up and automated high priority regression test cases.

Neohapsis, Inc, San Jose, CA 2008 - 2010

As a Director of QA delivered high quality releasesfor Neohapsis J2EE Framework based Compliance (SOX, Financial controls), Application Security, GRC software in VMWare ESX.

Developed Automation framework based on QTP, wrote/reviewed VB Script Code, automated 65% of test cases, resulting in significant improvement in regression testing, faster test cycles.

Made strategic changes in QA processes that resulted in improved Quality of Neohapsis Releasesand significantly improved Customer SAT metrics.

Worked Technically hands on- installing, testing and configuring Neohapsis applications, Microstrategy Server for functional, Load testing of applications, Data Warehouse, ETL processes.Co-ordinated/performed Beta installments of Product. ManagedPalamida Security scanning project to audit code and published audit report for OSS compliance and Security vulnerabilities.

Evaluated open source and commercial tools for QA process and productivity improvements.

Applied Bio-systems, Inc (Life Technologies) 2006 – 2008

As a Director of Quality Assurance delivered successful releases in,SaaS B2B-Portal, eCommerce, Custom Bio-tech Oligo manufacturing applications, Mapviewer Genomic tools, Webmethods, SAP (MM,PP,SD,FI) functional, integration testing with a team of 10 SQA Engineers, 4 Offshore SQA Engineers (Singapore), 3 SQA Supervisors.

Delivered quality releases on J2EE based Portal, C++, C,VOIP, CTI applications. Developed and reviewed Test cases in support of Oligo Manufacturing, and Bio-medical Instrumentation Manufacturing processes conforming to Six Sigma, FDA Title 21, Code of Federal Regulations (CFR).

Reported to the CIO as part of the CIO Leadership team. Developed ITIL based processes for QA, Helpdesk which resulted in significant application quality improvement. Wrote RFP’s, evaluated vendor responses to RFP’s, wrote SOW’s, SLA’s, and monitored SLA’s.

Developed Automation Framework based on Quick Test Professional, and a CustomReport Server using J2EE technologies. Automated End-to-End, System Integration testing using QTP, BPT (Tao). Automated testing reduced regression test cycle time by 70% and reduced regression defects substantially.

Demonstrated leadership in leading cross-functional team, resulting in Applied IT winning Computerworld 100 Best Places to work in IT award.

Broadvision, Inc, Redwood City, CA 2003 - 2006

As a Director of QA, Build & Porting/Localization Engineering provided leadership for 2 QA Managers, 4 QA Leads, 1 CM Lead, 2 Porting/Localization Engineering Managers with a total engineering staff of 34.

Established and managed QA Departments in US, India and China and a Porting/Localization Engineering Department in India.Using the hybrid Onshore/offshore QA model resulted in cost savings of approx $1.7 million/yr.

Implemented CPI, resulting in better QA Test Specifications and improved QA Engineers knowledgebase. Executed Performance, Stress tests using Loadrunner for Broadvision’s J2EE eCommerce, Portal, and Content Management (.NET).Developed, tested and deployed Business processes using Broadvision Process-BPML based tools. Tested I18N versions of the software.

Delivered over 7 Major Product Releases, 12 Patch and Maintenance Releases on schedule and in good quality on Multiple OS, Application Servers, and Databases. Products include Broadvision Enterprise, Process, and Portal, Commerce applications.

Was hired as a QA Director. Subsequently was given additional responsibilities in establishing and managing a Porting/Localization team that Ported Broadvision Code to OS- HP-UX, AIX, Application Servers- Weblogic 8.1, Websphere 5.x, Databases Db-2, MySQL, and Informix. Porting/Localization Team delivered 3 Major Releases of ENU and 2 Japanese L-10N Releases on schedule. Lead CMMI and customer audits.

Siebel, inc (now www.Oracle.com), Emeryville, CA 1998 – 2003

As a Software Quality Assurance Engineer, Performed Quality Assurance of Siebel Web Client, Client & Server testing including Enterprise Integration Manager, Upgrades, Workflow, Assignment Manager, Siebel Analytics, Web client, Load and Performance Tests for Siebel’s Verticals QA group (Siebel Finance, Siebel Consumer Goods, Siebel Healthcare).

Lead a team of 4 QA Engineers for Siebel Localization Engineering in Galway, Ireland. Supported Localization Releases of Siebel 7.0.3, 7.0.4 Industry Solutions Web Client.

Developed Test plans, Test cases for Siebel Client, Server components. Performed I18N Internationalization testing on Siebel applications.

Developed automation test scripts using Winrunner, stored procedures using PL/SQL, Visual Test, eStl to verify code level functionality of the products.

Performed Data migration for Import/Export/Merge/Delete using Siebel Base Tables and Interface Tables (ORACLE 9i, SQL Server 2000) using PERL. Used DATAGEN to populate Volume Databases and performed Server Load tests for scalability using Loadrunner. Tested SAP/R3-Siebel Enterprise Connector and 7.5 Web Clients.

Developed test plans, Black and White Box test procedures, Verified installation, performance, Upgrades, Mobile Client, Siebel Wireless (WML, WAP).

Education

oM.S in Mechanical Engineering, (Major: Computer-Aided Engineering), Ohio University, Athens, Ohio. Graduate Merit Scholarship.

oB.S.M.E, (Honors) College of Engineering, Guindy, India.

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