Scrum Master Software Development

Troy Jones

Dallas, TX, ***** 832-***-**** ***************@*****.*** GitHub LinkedIn

SUMMARY

Fifteen plus years of experience mobilizing, supporting and coaching teams and leaders in the technology space using Agile values, principles and frameworks.

Strong technical background which includes experience with a myriad of different programming languages and technologies, including C++, Object Pascal, Java, JavaScript, NodeJS, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL-Server, and REST APIs.

Highly skilled Agile Coaching focusing on improving software development practices and successful and sustainable product delivery.

Accomplished Agile project management professional, having served 10+ years as a Scrum Master, Agile Software Development Manager/Director and Agile Coach.

Continuous learner holding several Agile certifications including Professional Scrum Master I & II, Certified Scrum Product Owner, Professional Agile Leader (PAL I), Professional Agile Leadership – Evidence Based Management (PAL-EBM), and Kanban Fundamentals Practitioner (KFP).

CERTIFICATIONS

Professional Scrum Master (PSM) I & II Professional Agile Leadership (PAL I) Professional Agile Leadership – Evidence Based Management (PAL-EBM) Kanban Fundamentals Practitioner (KFP) Certified SAFe 5 Practitioner Certified SAFe 5 Agilist SAFe 5 Scrum Master Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)

SKILLS

JavaScript Node Java NodeJS Express PostgreSQL MongoDB Oracle SQL Server HTML CSS Git Hibernate Bootstrap Spring SQL Winston

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Baxter Planning Austin, TX January 2023 - January 2024

Senior Software Development Manager & Agile Lead

●Facilitated Agile ceremonies and instructed the Agile teams on how to facilitate these meetings. This included the Daily Scrum, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective. Introduced the organization to effective biweekly Backlog Refinement sessions which reduced the time required for Sprint Planning by 50%. Initiated and led Discovery Sessions and implemented an Iteration Zero into the Agile process to prevent the teams from thrashing at the beginning of new projects. This resulted in greater velocity for all projects initiated after the change.

●Improved the transparency of Agile projects by designing an Engineering Dashboard for leadership and project stakeholders. The dashboard reported on Product Backlog health, forecasted completion dates based on team velocity, and any potential risk areas. The dashboard reported on defect metrics, e.g. find and fix rates and categorized bugs by root cause. The dashboard reflected Engineering Team spend by Scrum team, detailing how much time the Scrum Teams spent on Maintenance vs. New Features vs. Defects.

●Refined project execution by leading a biweekly project review (using the Engineering Dashboard) to discuss progress and coordinate the dependencies between five Scrum Teams. The goals of the meeting were risk identification, issue and dependency management, evaluation of project resourcing (i.e. the correct number of resources and the appropriate skills), communication of target completion dates and managing any stakeholder expectations around target completion dates.

●Worked closely with senior leadership to build Agile teams with the appropriate skill mix to successfully complete projects. Placed a heavy focus on building sustainable teams that could take on a variety of assignments without reconstructing the teams. Improved the talent level entering the Engineering Team by making improvements to the interview process. Identified the cultural/technical traits required to recruit “T-shaped” engineers and restructured the interview process to successfully identify and hire qualified candidates.

●Raised the effectiveness of the Scrum Teams by reducing the amount of time required for a new developer to meaningfully contribute by 40%. Accomplished primarily through implementing an engineering onboarding program. The onboarding program included a plan to improve and maintain the current technical documentation, create/evangelize training, assign onboarding buddies and conduct periodic retrospectives of the process to identify future improvements.

●Tweaked the communication between stakeholders and the Scrum Teams by reintroducing the Sprint Review to the organization. Resulted in the delivery of more timely and meaningful feedback from the stakeholders. Facilitated and taught the Scrum teams how to facilitate Sprint Retrospectives which resulted several team improvements, one of which was the previously mentioned enhancements to the engineering onboarding process. Improved the value of the Sprint Increments by teaching the Product Owners successful product and sprint backlog creation and working with the Scrum Teams on how to create a meaningful Sprint Goal.

●Enhanced customer experience by serving as the point of contact between Product Support and the Engineering team. Created a JIRA dashboard to streamline and communicate customer issue prioritization. Facilitated the weekly triage meeting with Engineering, Support and Product Management to assess the priority and severity of customer reported defects. Worked with Product Owners and Engineering Leads to assign and prioritize critical customer issues among the Scrum Teams.

Student – DevMountain, Web Development July 2022 - November 2022

Career Break – Health and Well-Being April 2020 - June 2022

Apex Systems Dallas, TX January 2020 – March 2020

Scrum Master at Southwest Airlines

Provided Agile coaching to Scrum Teams in a SAFe environment. Educated and reinforced Scrum methodology and Agile framework to team members and stakeholders.

Provided day-to-day training and coaching on team agility practices and leadership habits to four teams in the digital platform space. This included Scrum, Kanban, defining work, story-writing and mapping, probabilistic estimation team agreements, leadership learning, product strategy, prioritization, and risk management.

Coached product owner on how to manage the backlog for continuous delivery of product features. Protected the development team from outside distractions and facilitated impediment removal to allow them to stay focused on product delivery.

Supported group delivery of workshops, materials and agile events across the organization with other agile leaders which resulted in new insights and mindset shifts across the departments.

Actively coached leaders and delivery team members in a one-on-one setting with a focus on growth goals and role needs.

Established an Agile Community of Practice with internal team members and leadership to discuss best practices and strategy.

Improving Enterprises Plano, TX October 2018 - November 2019

Agile Coach at Toyota, North America

●Increased the leadership skills of the technical staff by directly mentoring five Scrum Masters, providing guidance on Agile facilitation, process, coaching practices, and ceremonies to improve the consistency of on-time quality software deliverables and staff retention

●Instructed seven Product Owners on value delivery through coaching on value stream mapping, product visioning, user story writing, prioritization techniques and backlog refinement to improve the organization’s ability to deliver maximum value to their customers quickly.

●Coached senior leaders (National Managers & VP’s) on how to measure the maturity of the Agile teams and overall progress of Toyota IT’s Agile transformation so that the organization could easily determine where additional techniques, training, or technologies could be applied to improve value delivered to the customer.

●Conducted educational workshops (Agile Boot Ups) on Agile fundamentals, Scrum and Kanban for an organization of seventy-five people.

●Collaborated with development managers to identify areas for improvement in team delivery practices.

●Implemented Agile forecasting techniques for predictable and attainable delivery timelines.

Trintech Addison, TX December 2016 - August 2018

Director of Software Engineering

●Grew the engineering team to 30 members, including 2 Engineering Managers and 3 Scrum Masters to satisfy the growing needs of the business

●Improved the cadency and quality of software deliveries by identifying and improving technical and leadership skills gaps within the engineering staff, implementing Agile methodologies, and guiding the team through three major product releases and seven minor releases of the Trintech Cadency product.

●Reduced the maintenance costs of software releases by leading a “Close & Compliance'' modernization project. As a result of the efforts above, the product release testing cycle fell by two weeks saving over 600 man-hours of testing effort and reducing the production defect count by 150 as compared to the previous release.

●Supervised, the migration of backend and frontend code to common open-source frameworks such as Spring, Hibernate, and AngularJS in conjunction with delivering new product features requested by the business owners.

Availity Richardson, TX January 2014 - May 2016

Sr. Application Development Manager, Dallas Site Lead

●Improved application maintainability by leading the effort to move legacy Health Plan & Health Provider User Interfaces from a mix of server side and client-side UI architectures/frameworks to a unified client-side architecture (JavaScript and Angular).

●Collaborated on a project with Florida Blue to replace their existing Health Care Claims search tool with new functionality built into the Availity portal. The migration of their existing user interface and SOAP backend claims system improved the user experience by allowing for a more seamless integration with other pre-existing claims functionality provided in the Availity portal.

●Served as the management leader for the Dallas office. Met bi-weekly with the other functional leaders in the Dallas office to discuss issues related to site operations and employee engagement with the overall goal of making Availity an attractive workplace for talented developers in the Dallas area.

IEX, a Nice Corporation Richardson, TX August 2011 - December 2013

Sr. Software Engineering Manager & Scrum Master

●Worked with the product management organization to select content for major releases, develop project milestones and monitor the progress of the release.

●Worked with the customer support and maintenance engineering groups to develop a prioritization system to quickly identify and address customer issues. This included building a maintenance team of developers and QA engineers to focus on the customer issues and laying out a recurring maintenance release schedule that maximized defect content while minimizing the time between scheduled maintenance releases.

●Introduced Agile and Scrum techniques to improve the team’s ability to execute on projects including the identification and removal of technical debt, the evangelizing of development best practices to the rest of the organization, the improvement of product performance, and the resolution of escalated customer issues

●Set yearly goals for 15 direct reports and held regular one-on-one meetings to monitor their progress towards the goals.

●Wrote yearly performance reviews for each employee evaluating how well the goals were accomplished. Made salary and bonus recommendations based on my assessment of the employee’s individual performance.

●Identified any underperforming employees and worked with them in a focused manner to improve their performance.

PeopleAnswers Richardson, TX March 2011 - July 2011

Application Development Manager

Kronos Incorporated Boston, MA Alpharetta-GA Cleburne-TX August 1998-December 2010

Senior Java Developer Manager Senior Manager Scrum Master

EDUCATION

DevMountain Dallas, TX November 2022

●Web Development Program

Boston University Boston, MA June 1996

●Software Engineering Certificate

University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA May 1993

●Bachelor of Science, Mechanical Engineering

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