PRADEEP ANKALA

(***) ***- **** adcp7d@r.postjobfree.com

www.linkedin.com/in/pradeep-ankala

RICHMOND, VA (or) REMOTE-WORK

SUMMARY

Senior IT/QA leader with 12+ years of combined experience in providing enterprise level QA solutions from scratch-up. Expert in building, coaching and leading on-shore and off-shore teams (Software Test Developers, QA Engineers, Automation Engineers, Developers) to deliver quality and high performing software on-time and within budget.

EDUCATION

Masters (MS) in Computer Science, Portland State University, Portland, Oregon, USA

Bachelor of Engineering (BE) in Computer Science, Bharathiar University, India.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

Managing 10+ team members and achieving 50 % reduction in client facing bugs reported to by Support team across multiple products by providing better quality and performing software products to customers.

Championed the building of automation framework from ground zero and achieved 100% coverage of CRITICAL regression features with 300+ test conditions for crossover into agile/scrum iterative cycles to give better and quicker feedback to CTO and dev teams.

Introduced Jenkins and GIT to manage automation regression suite to align with CI/CD practices.

Certified in ITIL V3 framework and best practices in IT service management.

Responsible for developing innovative testing strategies and streamlining existing QA lifecycle with business and development groups to reduce testing cycles by ~33% across multiple projects by providing automated solutions and coaching QA team members to become subject experts of the Software under test( SUT) .

Successfully built separate QA and UAT env separate from the existing development/QA env to relive some of the dependencies which was slowing the efforts of both Dev and QA teams.

Hands on with strong trouble-shooting, problem-solving and analytical skills (scoring 95+ percentile in GRE analytical and quantitative sections combined).

Re-designed onshore and offshore delivery models to remove testing redundancy.

Hands on experience working closely with, Business analysts, Software developers, Sales members, Customer-relationship Managers and Support to deliver high performance and quality software products to customers (mainly in financial industry for the last 10+ yrs).

Strong communication and leadership skills coupled with good interpersonal skills to provide better solutions and resolve issues internally and client-facing when needed.

Experienced in budgeting, scheduling and resource allocation of resources for projects.

Clear understanding of object oriented and programming languages like C/C#, C++, Java, ASP.Net) to manage FTE’s.

Worked extensively in AGILE with Scrum, Iterative, Feature driven development (FDD), Test Driven Development (BDD) and Waterfall SDLC methodologies.

Experience with focus on analyzing system functionality, design and implementation of QA testing methodology and extensive use of all QA and Object-Oriented practices to design test automation framework.

Strong experience in Manual and Automation Software Testing which includes Mobile Testing, Web Services Testing, working SDLC methodologies such as Waterfall, Agile and Scrum.

Proficient in performing GUI, Functional testing, System testing, Regression testing, Backend testing, Smoke testing, Performance Testing using various testing tools and methodologies.

Experience in Bug Reporting and Defect tracking, Conducting Bug review meetings and coordinating with Development team for Bug Fixation.

Experience in Business Functionality Testing, User Interface testing, Unit testing, Integration Testing, Black Box Testing, End-to-end Testing, Manual Testing, UAT Testing, Regression Testing, Performance Testing, documentation and Reporting.

Experience in QA testing (Manual & Automation), Web based n-tier & Client-server based applications.

Well versed in all phases of testing like GUI/Interface, Functionality, System, Smoke, Integration, UAT, Usability, Stress, Performance, Regression, Production validation testing.

Familiar with running teams for Database/Backend Testing using PL-SQL & Python.

TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE

C/C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, VB, Python, SQL, PL/SQL, VSTS, .Net, ASP .Net, Windows 95/98/NT/200/XP/7, Redhat Linux, Suse Linux, UNIX, Solaris 7/8/9, Mac, IBM Director, VMWare, Puppet, Shell scripting (Bourne/Korne), SQL Server 2000/2005/2008, Oracle 9i/1l0g, MS-Access, MS Project, DB2, Web Service, REST, SOAP, XML, GITHUB, Jenkins, WebLogic, WebSphere, TCP/IP, Network protocols, FIX protocol, QMetry, QTP, LoadRunner, Quality Center, Testrail, Ranorex, Selenium Webdriver, Test Director, PVCS Tracker, Rational ClearQuest, Test Manager, Documentum, JIRA, Azure DevOps, AWS

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Fidelity National Financials, Richmond, VA Jan’19 – Apr’20

Senior Testing Consultant

Fidelity National Financials (FNF) and its family of companies is the leading title insurance and underwriter services provider in USA. It has 2000+ employees’ spread mostly between USA (FL) and India (Bengaluru). My present responsibilities are to work as a liaison between the Development in Richmond, VA; Product- stakeholders in Florida, Security/QA/Automation team (15+) in India and Support, UAT teams spread across different regions of US. During my tenure I have introduced and streamlined pre-dev phases (better defined requirement gathering by dev modules impacted analysis for better Test approaches) and QA cycles (creating better test strategies by getting feedback from BA’s and running daily QA status meetings). Successfully introduced SOP, SLA documents for communication between different groups across different time zones and escalation procedure timelines so not lose valuable time during Dev+QA cycles. Creating process around daily run automation cycles defined by code modules impacted.

Responsibilities:

Work with multiple development teams to help establish, improve, and implement standards, processes, and procedures

Daily scrum meetings with development and support

Designed onshore/offshore delivery models and expectations to stakeholders.

Built a dependable QA framework to support business requirements

Improved and extended existing automation scripts to GIT push dev module based nightly runs from generic automation runs.

Introduced monthly scorecards for individual QA personnel and project management for continuous improvement and analysis of deliverables.

Primary point of contact for ALL Virginia software QA work from planning to resource identification to testing time allocation

Proven experience in identifying and managing project risks, issues and dependencies

Experience with communication and engagement at all levels of SDLC phases

Environment: C/C++, Erlang, .Net, XML, 2016 SQL server, GIT, Selenium Webdriver, Contrast, Azure DevOps, TFS, Sharepoint, Citrix

*Personal Time-off /Travel to India Apr’18 – Dec’18

DASH Financial Technologies (LiquidPoint), Chicago, IL Mar ’17 - Mar ’18

Head of QA (Associate Director)

ConvergEX (LiquidPoint), Chicago, IL Feb ’14 - Feb ’17

QA Manager (On-shore & Off-shore teams)

BNYConvergEX (LiquidPoint), Chicago, IL Jun ’09 - Feb ’14

Senior QA – Assistant Vice President

LiquidPoint which was formerly part of BNY-ConvergEx LLC CovergEX LLC DASH Financial Tech LLC has been a leading provider of global agency brokerage and investment technology solutions. In the electronic options trading industry, LiquidPoint had presence in three key areas – execution and liquidity management, investment technologies and intermediary and clearing services.My original responsibilities when I started off was to build a QA team from ground up and inform/educate other teams the importance of proper QA practices. Down the road my responsibilities changed to managing these professionals (on-shore and off-shore). During my tenure I had identified/created and standardize QA related processes which could work in this business entity. My teams were not only involved in designing and developing the test-plans/strategies for various software applications but also to document, implement, monitor, and enforce all processes and procedures for testing is established as per standards defined and agreed upon by the stakeholders. During these years I was able to cut short the 6-week QA cycles to 4-weeks due to implementation of better procedures in the pre-development phase which also helped us identify our redundancies in testing efforts. As an important entity of the SDLC phase, my team has been able to release better quality products to clients which helped in more satisfied customer and sales teams, who could add more customers which in-turn increased our revenue & EBIDTA year-over-year for the company.

Responsibilities:

Managing and overlooking the testing efforts so as to deliver issue-free quality software to our clients on time, including process checks on QA team members in Chicago, USA and Bangalore, India.

Overall status reporting to all stake holders.

Developed QA budgets, hire, train, and supervise QA Engineers, Test Automation developers and product managers.

My teams were not just testing different releases/versions of the applications but were identified as one of the CORE team of the company and were the central point of contact between the development team and the system engineering team. We were also always training and giving valuable feedback to the Support and Sales teams.

Work with the Automation Engineers to identified elements and workflows to automate with Ranorex (for desktop app) and Selenium Web-driver (risk analysis web service/app) and developed scripts to run them using C# and Java.

My day-to-day tasks also involved, analyzing system requirements and develop test plans, test cases and test schedules for the team members based my high-level and architectural understanding of all the components. And also perform testing of important core components to be sure there are no functionality and database issues.

Document, implement, monitor, and enforce all processes and procedures for testing is established as per standards defined in the organization.

Environment: C/C++, C#, Java, ASP.net, XML,Visual Basic, Python, SQL server, Ranorex, Selenium Webdriver, Testrail, QMtery, JIRA, FIX messaging, Jenkins, GIT

JPM Chase, Chicago, IL Apr ’08 - Jun ’09

Senior Software QA Engineer

Deal Manager2.3 & 3.0: Deal Manager is an application utilized by Sales, Implementations, and Service for processing JPMorgan Chase incoming deals. The main purpose of Treasury Services Deal Manager (TSDM) is to support; new, incremental and maintenance of Treasury services products and services from sales and service to Implementation. It is a web-based application and is accessible via the internet with seamless integration with Customer Knowledge center. This application generates/validates data connected to many back-end servers (some being mainframe servers) ORACLE. TSDM eliminates manual data verification and re-keying of information by connecting to key system of records, reducing cycle time and increasing accuracy. Most of the account and customer data is stored in these mainframe servers which are connected via a middleware consisting of J2EE application server.

Responsibilities:

As part of the System test team I was testing different releases/versions of the applications and was the main contact between the Dev team and the QA team.

Designed Test Cases and participated in review inspections.

Create/choose test scripts for regression, data driven and cross platform testing in Quality Center

Create test logs and test results Summary reports and send them to dev team

Preparation of Test cases, Execution and Test result reports using Quality Center

Performed Smoke testing of the application for testing different functionality and database mapping issues for different cycles/versions of TSDM

Formulation of Master Test plans, Test cases and Test scripts

Involvement in Blackbox testing, manual testing and automated testing of Applications on Windows environments.

Modifying/updating existing regression scripts that were in Mercury QTP.

Logged and tracked the defects using Rational Clear Quest defect tracking system

Central point of contact during System, Integration and User Acceptance test cycles.

Act as the single point of contact between Development and Testing team for iterations, Testing and deployment activities

Helped in generating reports using Business Objects.

Database validation testing when migrating from Oracle 9I to 10G

Assign task to all Testing Team members (off-shore) and ensure that all of them have sufficient work in the project.

Environment: HP Quality Center 9.2, IBM Rational ClearQuest, IBM Rational ClearCase, Mercury QTP, SQL Navigator 4.4 (for Oracle 9I & 10G connectivity), Extra Mainframe Connection Client version 6.7, Webmethods 7.1, J2EE application server, WebSphere v5.1.2, PRPC systems

Itron, Spokane, WA Jan ’07 - Mar ’08

Software QA Engineer (2 projects)

Genesis Network: Due to the resent US government Energy Policy Act of 2005 the Daylight Saving Time (DST) start and stop date will be changed starting 2007.My responsibilities for this project includes not only setting up the test environment needed for “Genesis Fixed network” group but also planning/ developing test cases required for the DST changes that can impact the software in Itron systems.

Fixed Network 2.X: The new Fixed network software is Itron’s solution for collecting standard consumptions, interval data readings, leak detection data and tamper data from endpoint- equipped meters in a utility system. My responsibilities include designing the test design specifications document from the MRD’s for “On demand reads” and “Interval data readings”. Manual testing of API’s and database stored procedures and automating the test cases identified using Worksoft Certify v7.2. Testing environment included working on Microsoft SQL server 2005, SQL query analyzer, Microsoft .Net framework SDK v 2.0, and customized tools.

Responsibilities:

Test setup, design, test execution and test reporting for complex product solution consisting of numerous hardware and software components.

Architecture consists of HW and embedded firmware applications, radio protocol, web technologies, SQL Server DB, Oracle DB, GUI, stored procedures, extremely large amounts of data processing, and complex algorithms for processing data.

Ability to work from functional specifications to write Test plans.

As a team member was involved in writing Test plans, creating Test cases ensuring that the developed software performs as detailed by the business requirements.

Involved in different phases testing which includes Functionality testing, Regression Testing, system testing of the Application

Developed SQL Queries to check the database Integrity.

Environment: Worksoft Certify v7.2 (for QTP), Rational ClearQuest, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, AIX 5.2, Oracle Server 8.1.7.4.0, Tru64 UNIX 5.1B, Windows NT 2000, Windows XP SP1a, Linux, Microsoft .Net framework SDK v 2.0

Intel Corporation, DuPont, WA Nov ’05 - Jul ’06

Blades-Server Validation Engineer

Blades Software Evaluation (BSE) group was involved in testing the SW of the management module (MM) which manages the blades (14 servers in the blades chassis). This group has been working closely with IBM, the original developers of the blades-server architecture.

Responsibilities:

Functional testing of pre-boot and OS present flash utilities on Windows ‘2003 (32 & 64 bit), RH Linux AS & AW & Linux SuSE.

Functional testing of Management Module software.

Functional testing of BIOS, BMC firmware and Diagnostics.

Testing involved working with x86 architecture CPU’s (both 32-bit and 64-bit).

Developing Test plans & executing Test cases to test the functionality of applications and firmware with in-depth knowledge of object oriented languages.

Worked closely with developer’s in the design and development of automation tools using Tcl/Tk

Executed various Shell scripts to run various batch processes.

Used Documentum as central repository to hold test cases and files

Proficient use of customized utilities and diagnostics validation tools (both SW&HW).

Perform regular and frequent server hardware installations as well as alpha - gold phase (Production Release) hardware upgrades, including but not limited to processors, board sets, management modules, switches, power supplies, fans and memory, etc.

Responsible for ensuring the SUT is updated to the current server stack: BIOS, Firmware (BMC & HSC), FRUs, SDRs & VPDs.

Tested and authored OS installation BKMs [best known methods].

Support, and at times train new student-contractors on software under test.

Environment: PVCS Tracker, Documentum, PC-Dos, Customized automated tools, object oriented programming concepts, Windows, Red-hat/ Suse Linux, Tcl/Tk

Louisiana Pacific Corporation, Portland, OR Oct ’04 - Sep ’05

End-User-Computing Test Engineer (Intern)

Primary responsibilities included “Cross-model software image creation/testing” and “s/w management with IBM Director 4.20”.

Responsibilities:

Built cross-model computer software images that worked on different hardware and several models of IBM & HP machines (desktops and laptops) using SYSPREP tool.

Built customized batch files, MS registry files and system preparation files.

Defined and tested new standards for LP’s Wireless Internet access project.

Recommended and purchased computer hardware and software.

Worked closely with “System Admin”& “Business Analyst” to define several IT standards.

Environment: Win 98/2000/XP, PC-DOS, Microsoft Sysprep tool, IBM Director 4.20

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