Senior SDET/Program Manager

Suma Burla

425-***-**** ****.*****@*****.***

PRODUCT LEADER

Leadership and Business Development

oConfident, credible, and cross functional leader with great collaborative skills in planning, prioritizing, executing, multitasking, communicating, and influencing onshore and offshore cross functional teams

oExperienced in agile development as scrum master, tracking burndowns, managing workload and product backlog

oStrong negotiation and consensus building skills, ability to thrive in a challenging, demanding and rapidly changing environment

oExperienced in various domains like e-commerce, client/server products, desktop configuration, analytics DataMart, devices, and internet/intranet-based apps including v1 products

oProficient in gathering requirements, business and logical modeling, and user scenario creation

oWell versed in release management of both core and world ready features of various products including web apps across multiple teams (12 teams) located at 6 different geographical locations

Team Building and Crisis Management

oResponsible for managing resources including FTEs (interim lead of an 8-member team), allocating, managing, and mentoring a team of 22 members

oInstrumental in interviewing/hiring tech talent and help increase the team’s average productivity

oManaged an acute customer satisfaction crisis by reviving at-risk features, defining ad unifying SLA’s across 3 partner teams resulting in 50% reduction of production support time and retaining 100 % of elite customers

Customer Relationship and Communications

oExperienced in analyzing customer feedback, product usage, patterns, and suggesting product improvements

oHighly organized release coordinator with responsibilities of managing project timelines and backlogs, meticulously driving hot fixes and world readiness of the product, and tracking and reporting bug stats

Design, planning and execution

oExperienced in project and process management, program management, all phases of SDLC, people management, and vendor management, designing features, software development and testing, and globalization and localization

oAchieved expertise in designing and developing tools to improve data quality, save costs, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce live site issues by 60%

oPowerful problem solver and solution designer paying attention to detail and applying a wide range of experience in Incorporating best practices in teams to increase productivity

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Languages/ Script: C#, C, T-SQL, PostgreSQL, SCOPE Scripts, JavaScript, VB Script

RDBMS/Databases: SQL-Server (Microsoft Certified), Knowledge of MS Access, Dynamo DB, Redshift

Other: Agile, Waterfall methodologies, Kanban, MS Project

Cloud Technologies: AWS services including Redshift, Dynamo DB, S3, IAMRoles, Cloud formation templates for various services, EC2, Lambda

Tools: Selenium, Coded UI, TFS, Product Studio, Altassian, JIRA Bug Tracking tool, MS Test Manager, Test Simulator, Data Stats Tool, Distributed Storage Diagnostic tool, Bingo, Gestalt (Data Analysis tool), SUITT Test Automation tools, WTT, AIDE NOCODE tool, Build Compare, Beyond Compare, Policheck, Loc Studio

CAREER TRACK

Redmond Children’s Academy (Co-Founder and Director) 2018 – TILL DATE

Managed startup phase of the preschool including facility set-up, hiring teachers, and managing their activities and schedules

Developed policies, curriculum, and program operations, and created parent and staff handbooks

Managed customer relations and communications and maintained working relationship with licensing authorities

Maintained the center’s compliance with all federal, state, and local laws

Gurukul (Program Manager, Committee Member, and Volunteer for Non-Profit Organization) 2015 – TILL DATE

Responsible for curriculum development, process development, and increasing organizational efficiency for a large nonprofit organization of about 1500 students and 250 staff

Managed and lead a team of 21 teachers and a Liaison officer for the committee and the teaching staff

Nordstrom Inc. (Senior Program Manager Lead) 2016 – 2018

Leadership and Business Development

Successfully drove the release of multiple feature sets for Nordstrom and its subsidiaries like NordRack/Hautelook/Loyalty/FLS Store, across multiple teams and organizations (9 teams & 5 organizations)

Lead sprint planning, daily stand-up meetings, release planning, demos, tracking burn-downs reports, escalating, removing impediments, and managing workload, product backlog, and feature feasibility studies across teams

Lead V1 version of the reporting project involving creating analytics DataMart, collecting data from multiple vendors, and creating the needed reports for stake holders

Developed KPI dashboards to help the service center with usage stats, response times, and error stats, and increased the overall productivity of both the leadership team & the product management team

Led a team of 10 people and designed the mission critical Service Activation System with 99.9% reliability

Customer Relationship and Communications

Improved the IRT’s (product support team) new product support development framework (outside of my organization) and helped the team reduce its customer support costs by 40%,

Designed and developed alerting for service center’s monitoring and alerting system, capturing ~99% failures

Designed full end-to-end solution and integration/system testing & validations by collaborating across multiple teams spread across different orgs, resulting in high reliability rate & decrease in post release issues by over 70%

Drove integration testing across partner teams and communicated bi-weekly quality reports to the leadership teams with emphasized discussions on progress and impediments

Developed architectural designs and functional specs based on stake holder’s requirements and user feedback

Team Building and Crisis Management

Interviewed people, and coordinated efforts in allocating 12 candidates across different teams in the org

Identified and developed Note-creator tool to unblock partner teams from testing the product (later adopted widely across various teams for testing/training)

Microsoft Corporation (Program Manager) 2013 – 2015

Leadership and Business Development

Drove the release of MSN travel site by managing triage with program management, development, and testing triads, bug investigation and tracking, and by releasing and tracking hotfixes

Managed timelines and drove Globalization/Localizability test strategy planning and execution across multiple teams for the international edition of MSN

Laid the groundwork involving infrastructure, design, and processes for the new MSN travel site

Managed resources including FTEs (interim lead for 6 vendors and 2 interns)

Customer Relationship and Communications

Managed dogfood efforts of collecting user experience feedback for the new MSN website, analyzing user data, and helping the team prioritize and incorporate new feature requests and enhancement of existing features, resulting in an increase of 78% user base

Identified and drove various process improvements across partner teams, resulting in overall team performance improvements by preventing information loss, improving the test automation pass rate from 45% to 80%, reducing the OCEs (on call Engineers) response time by 50%

Improved product performance by driving data quality improvements across different platforms, reducing the conflation issues from thousands to a few hundreds, improving code review standards, triaging, and helping prioritize bugs, managing and tracking bug status, and reporting

Design and Implementation

Designed and developed a Diagnostic tool to monitor distributed storage system for MSN, supporting multiple partner teams and helping improve customer satisfaction by reducing the number and rate of live site issues by 60%

Designed and developed Data stats tool (Ingestion tool) running on Microsoft’s data analysis platform (Cosmos) that was consumed by various platforms to analyze and fix underlying conflation issues related to the quality of data consumed by the applications across partners, helping improve data quality issues by about 60%

Zillow Inc (Lead software Design engineer in test/Program manager) 2012 - 2013

Leadership and Business Development

Planned and managed multiple projects and resource allocation across both onshore and offshore teams

Lead efforts in developing new test processes and tools across teams located in various South and East Asian countries involving a team of 20 members

Customer Relationship and Communications

Managed and drove hot fixes and feature test passes across teams and performed release coordinator duties (released over 60 hotfixes/feature enhancements) along with tracking and reporting of bug/work item status

Design and implementation

Created design and architectural documents and other collaterals, resulting in a decrease of 40% in dev turn over time

Developed DB scripts and utility scripts to validate data and features, resulting in 58% decreased test cycle time

Wrote setup documents and specs for owned features and streamlined the process of installing tools resulting in decreasing the delay in continuous integration and testing of features by nearly 50%

Microsoft Corporation (Senior SDET / Program Manager) 2003 – 2011

Multiple Teams: Windows Embedded (experis inc), Global product development team (beyondsoft inc), point of sales, office shared services, and global service automation teams (volt computers inc)

Leadership and Business Development

Solely responsible for technically driving the multi-language test pass across the team and partner teams across the world for International Release

Identified specs with sensitivity for World Readiness and wrote functional specs

Performed release management for Search International team's various projects including answers, managing projects and schedules, driving the sprint meetings

Improved product quality by being the top bug finder during multiple product milestones with very little ramp up time

Design and implementation

Developed utility scripts to improve testing by test team members by automating the process of License testing and various configuration testing of the packages in different language combinations including plugins for automated tools used to schedule tests

Designed & developed common test automation infrastructure, resulting in easier UI automation for rest of the team involving both UI automation as well as service automation resulting in 65% decrease in test cycle

Owned both front-end and back-end database-level features end-to-end and developed test plans, test design documents, user scenarios and test cases

Performed functionality, unit, integrity, International sufficiency, localization, and data integrity tests across various products involving cross group collaboration with teams located in different geographical locations

LEARNING CREDENTIALS

Master of Engineering, (Power Electronics)

Bachelor of Engineering, (Electrical Engineering)

Microsoft Certified Professional (SQL Server 2005 Design and Implementation)

COMMUNITY WORK AND INTERESTS

KAP Project leader: The Kiran Anjali Project is a USA based nonprofit organization with a mission to provide educational opportunities to disadvantaged children, especially girls. Led a group of 15+ teenagers in raising $10K of funds for the cause during the summers of 2018 & 2019

High-school Volunteer: Volunteered in computer related courses, assisting the teacher in managing the class and helping students troubleshooting issues related to programming during the academic year 2019 -20 & 2021-22

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