Quality Assurance Manager

Maria T Stoddard

**** **** ***** ***** **, GA ***52 • 678-***-**** •

*****.********@*******.***

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

IT QUALITY ASSURANCE & TEST DIRECTOR

Accomplished QA Director with 25 years’ experience of hands on pragmatic experience growing, learning, supporting,

driving •Business & Technology alignment, •PMO Strategy and Execution, •Portfolio Prioritization •Quality Management

Planning and Execution, •Create customized and flexible test solutions, •HP Quality Center/HP ALM/HP PPM/HP PC

•Comprehensive Test Planning, Test Case Development and Automation for Applications, Services, Reports, •Business

Process Integration and Automation, •Requirements Analysis, •Cost Reduction and Containment, •ITIL 3, SDLC; Waterfall,

semi Agile (Scrum), modified RUP, V & V model, TMap, CMMI, PDLC, PMI/PMBOK •ISO 9001 Certification

•Development Support •Release, Issue and Change Management, Configuration Management, •Budget Development and

Management, •Staff Development and Coaching for leading travel, retail, telecommunications, software development

organizations. A real “go giver”!

Skilled in establishing, revitalizing, and optimizing IT models, teams, services, and projects to improve TCO through

greater quality assurance, testing, requirements and project management. Strength in building processes to create bridges

between management, teams, and partners to support business objectives across complex environments. Successful in

leading teams in evaluating, defining, and implementing value add processes, services, and tools.

CORE COMPETENCIES

• Quality Assurance • Project Management • Testing

• Business Analysis • Release Management • Configuration Management

HIGHLIGHTED RECENT CAREER ACHIEVEMENTS

• Maximized Capital Expense Created improved system of tracking resource utilization levels that

allowed for quicker adjustment of workloads to keep test team within the 90 percentile of being capitalized.

• Time to Market –Established strategic outsourcing relationships, which have rapidly extended capacity, meeting

critical deliverable timelines while reducing vendor costs by 22% per hour.

• Testing Results – Getting testing involved in the requirements phase for verification of requirements, we were able

to reduce the amount of code issues by 32%.

• Start Up – Accomplished 6th start up QA team, processes, procedures, and tools supporting products and services

• Maturation – Created personal/professional growth & developmental educational training programs . Developed

test frameworks to include automation of regression test suites as well as load/stress/performance benchmarks.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

PGi, Atlanta, Georgia

3/2013 – 9/2013

Director of IT QA

Summary

Managed several onshore and offshore test teams within 5 time zones

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Initiated testing as a service

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Initiated Agile Testing Framework

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Rebuild QA/Test team from test silos, product owned testers

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Established QA project related processes to measure and secure metrics of improvements and quality grade

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Defined test family job descriptions and skill/development needs for career path progression.

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Test environment design and reimplementation

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Hands on black box, regression, stress tester to assist, assess, and develop customized approach and strategy based

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on project needs and dates.

Responsible for aggressive test delivery strategy for video, web, and audio meeting solutions with support applications and

databases utilizing softphone, mobile, chat and email in the cloud and/or thin client.

Fulcrum Consulting, Atlanta, Georgia @ Delta

8/2012 3/2013

PMO QA Lead Contractor

Summary

Managed onshore and offshore test team

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Administrator, trainer, user for HP QC, HP ALM and PC

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Release management (RM) process development and oversight

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Tested new web technology for reservation agents worldwide (system, integration, and functional) in conjunction

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with offshore development vendor (Hexaware) with testing approach and strategy agreed to and in support of

project needs and dates.

Prepared weekly and monthly dashboards and approve resource hours.

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Within 5 months, determined which 2600 defects were required to be fixed to go live to 89 defects with the end

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user/client approval and support; scrubbed other defects and queued them into release fixes by business priority.

Pyramid Consulting, Inc., Atlanta, Georgia @ AT&T

4/2012 – 8/2012

QA Manager Contractor

Summary

Managed onshore/offshore automated test team to deliver quota of 100 scripts monthly via QTP.

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Created and enhanced Test Automation Framework test strategy, documentation and scripts for the Online Post

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MyATT.com, Device Self Service (DSS) Mobile and Device Self Service (DSS) Web applications.

Hands on script review, development mobile tester to assist, assess, and develop customized approach and strategy

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based on project needs and dates.

Trained AT&T testers on HP QC and automation framework

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Utilized QC/HP ALM, HP PC

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Prepared weekly and monthly reporting dashboards and approve resource hours.

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BCD Travel LLC, Atlanta, Georgia

2006 – 2011

Director Project & Quality Services

Summary

• Hands on, test experienced manager/director for 30+ distributed resources, vendors, partners

• Developed and drove the wide spread use of internal and external quality metrics which led to solving several

major quality issues and allowed continuous improvement efforts to begin

• Developed test methodology and strategies to bring about deployment success

• Maturation of processes to include application lifecycle management (ALM) to create managed lifecycle services

• Hired and managed QA, technical writers, graphic artists, and configuration manager on a global scale

• Established strategic best case test processes and goals for the growth of the brand new department

• Introduced and managed HP QC 10 and QTP, HP PC as well as HP PPM

• Introduced and managed performance testing for larger applications

• Established and integrated measures, metrics, and goals to drive performance and align IT and business strategies

through prioritization and resource management

• Service transition activities in the ITIL framework alignment with Operations, Telecommunications, IT

• Defined job descriptions and skill/development needs for career path progression.

• Languages: Microsoft C# and Microsoft Visual Basic.Net, HTML, JavaScript, Java, C++ environment for n tiered

and web applications and services (SaaS, SOA)

• Front End Tools used: Microsoft Visual Studio. Net 2003, 2005, Net 2008, open source such as DNN

• Databases used: Microsoft SQL Server 2000, 2005, 2008 R2, MySQL

The Home Depot Store Support Center, Atlanta, Georgia

2004 – 2006

Quality Assurance Manager

Summary

• Hands on black box, regression, stress tester to assist, assess, and develop customized approach and strategy based

on project needs and dates.

• Reviewed QTP scripts for test assistance

• Created and chaired on the steering committee for Quality Center of Excellence

• Administered, trained and policy driver for TestDirector (including QuickTest Pro)

• Built relationships with application and infrastructure teams to support cross team communications.

• Established task force to address application lifecycle management (ALM) initiative

• Co Authored and ensured adherence to QA standards and methodologies

• Project Managed the activities to bring a Certification Test Phase into existence

• Trained and assisted in test (script) automation via QTP and LoadRunner

T Mobile

2004 – 2004

QA Project Manager Contractor

Summary

• This included Project Management, Business Analysis, Quality Assurance, and Release Management

responsibilities for aggressive delivery schedule via Requisite Pro and TestDirector.

• Hands on black box, regression, stress tester to assist, assess, and develop customized approach and strategy based

on project needs and dates.

• Hold design meetings, develop work plans, resource planning with team leads, prepare status reports, report to

project budget daily team update meetings, issues resolution and risk mitigation.

• Successfully delivered prototype on schedule.

HP Interactive, Norcross, Georgia

2003 – 2003

Software Development Methodologies Manager

Summary

• Creation and management of change, schedule and delivery of a web based Real Estate MLS.

• This included Project Management, Business Analysis, Quality Assurance, and Release Management

responsibilities for aggressive delivery schedule.

• Established support, process, and methodologies for responsible areas.

• Web environment utilizing .NET technologies

HP & GE, Atlanta, Georgia

2003 – 2003

QA Management Contractor

Summary

• Formed, trained, and lead a QA (15+) team

• Hands on tester for GE’s contract maintenance scheduling system

• Project Management including the maintenance of the contract scheduling system for GE

• Release Management as GE required nearly weekly deliverables

• Delivered B2B & B2C application for HP Kiosks located at retail stores via real time communications with

customer specific portals.

Optio Software, Alpharetta, Georgia

2002 2002

Director Quality Initiatives Contractor

Summary

• As Director, Quality Initiatives involved sustaining, application engineering, documentation, release management,

configuration management, and quality assurance groups to bring about tested, supported and documented COTS

for commercial use. 42+ resources

• Established BETA test program.

RedCelsius, Alpharetta, Georgia

2000 – 2002

Quality Assurance Manager

Summary

Managed SQA and SCM teams (20+)

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Hands on SQA Manager

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Process Analyst for the company, established modified RUP engaging Product Development, Product

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Management, SQA, SCM, Training, Support, and Documentation.

Test strategy included system, black box, white box, browser, utilizing clean test environment.

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The software packages tested reflect wireless, system, client/server, web enabled, web based products utilizing

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JAVA, XSL, XSLT, XML, and HTML.

Interim VP of Development after VP resigned

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MCI Worldcom, Atlanta, Georgia

1999 – 2000

Quality Assurance Manager

Summary

Initiated and wrote processes, test plans, test scripts, defect tracking, risk assessments and mitigation and broaden

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the scope of testing to cover more scenarios; this led to an instant reduction in defects found in the field by 60%.

Trained team to write test scripts, write defects, prepare for test automation via WinRunner and LoadRunner and

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perform risk assessments and understand their perimeters.

The team migrated to automated test environment using TestDirector, WinRunner, and AstraTest.

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We also had responsibility for testing independent projects such as portal, web enabled and application server

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independent J2EE (Java2 Enterprise Edition) framework product integrated with custom presentation services

(using XML and XSL) and Weblogic.

My team had a 3% miss ratio, which we created an incident report on to improve on our delivery.

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Managed and mentored a staff of ten (contractors (80%) and permanent (20%) plus I initiated Configuration

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management that had a staff of two.

Brought CMM level attainment 4 to our business unit plus the company's first certified configuration manager.

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Management changes incorporated the use of Six Sigma methodologies. Began managing projects to Six Sigma

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protocols. All QA goals met within the first 2 quarters.

Previous 11 years’ experience QA/Testing experience with such companies as:

BellSouth Mobility

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Harbinger EDI

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Xerox

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Johnson & Johnson

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CSX

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EDUCATION

College of The Albemarle US-North Carolina-Elizabeth City

Business Administration

Rochester Institute of Technology – Rochester, NY

BS Computer Science

Georgia Highlands – Marietta, GA

In progress MS in DNA Computing

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