Director - Quality Assurance

Deborah M. Bannon ** Majestic Avenue ∙ Nashua, NH 03063

508-***-**** ∙ **********@*****.***

Summary:

Experienced Quality Assurance and Quality Engineering Manager with proven organization building skills. Demonstrated ability to implement new test strategies and test methodologies to improve quality within products. Recognized for excellent interpersonal and mentoring skills, dedication, work ethic and going the extra mile to get the job done.

Expertise includes:

• Quality Assurance

• SQA Methodologies • Leadership

• Development Life Cycle

• Test Automation Tools

• Career Advancement • Resource Allocation

• Organization Building

Selected Achievements:

• Increased Quality Engineering department from 8 to 40 Quality Engineers to improve quality and test coverage in over 30 products.

• Spearheaded test strategy to solve hardware team’s challenge of testing 25 different hardware configurations. Decreased test execution time from 40 hours to 2 hours using simulators instead of hardware for qualification.

• Decreased test completion time from 5 days to 1 day by augmenting automated testing by 50% using Silk Test and Silk Performer.

• Implemented networked hardware testing solution accessible to the team resulting in increased availability of hardware to technical support, training, engineering and quality engineering. Saved the company approximately $50,000 in unnecessary hardware purchases.

• Identified productivity issue on my team due to insufficient build and test environment. Lead a team to upgrade environment with improved hosts that saved the team 40 hours of troubleshooting hardware issues each release.

• Coordinated a root cause analysis which identified a process flaw when reporting issues in the product. Initiated a new process to uncover issues earlier in the release cycle. This new process increased bug fixing from 25% to 80% since the engineers had more time to address issues in the current release.

Experience:

Manager, Quality Engineering, The MathWorks – Natick, MA 2001 – 2009

Signal Processing and Communications QE Department

• Managed a staff of 40 Quality Engineering professionals (both managers and individual contributors), wrote and delivered performance reviews, mentored and motivated staff to advance individual career and technical growth. Collaborated with Engineering managers to transfer quality engineers into software engineering, establishing a sustainable culture of continuous improvement.

Deborah M. Bannon (Page 2) 31 Majestic Avenue ∙ Nashua, NH 03063

508-***-**** ∙ **********@*****.***

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• Lead a team who developed and executed tests using automation written in MATLAB code and 3rd party software, Mentor Graphics ModelSim and Texas Instruments Code Composer Studio.

• Supported an agile development like process to qualify features. Participated in daily and weekly status meetings to discuss progress and blocking issues on features.

• Implemented several strategies to improve quality throughout releases (metrics to showcase Quality initiatives, various testing philosophies (performance, system, unit)) and to help implement quality throughout the development life cycle.

• Worked with technical support to better understand customer issues and to improve testing best practices to conform to customer needs.

• Managed a team of four off-shore quality engineers who contributed to planning, test execution and analysis of test results.

Manager, SQA, Cisco Systems, Inc – Waltham, MA 2000 - 2001

Service Provider Business Area

• Created the QA department in a startup organization, acquired by Cisco Systems. Managed a team of 6 permanent QA engineers and several contractors for testing.

• Designed, developed and implemented automated regression test suite for Windows platforms and browsers using Segue Silk Test application.

• Expanded on performance, scalability and load balance testing using Silk Performer and Cisco proprietary tools.

• Implemented QA methodologies to adhere to Cisco ISO standards; test plan creation, documenting test results and providing bug metrics upon completion of releases.

QA Manager, Putnam Investments - Andover, MA 1997 - 2000

• Managed the first Quality Assurance department within the Equity and Fixed Income Front Office Trading Systems which consisted of 12 QA engineers and 1 QA manager.

• Implemented QA methodologies using PVCS Bug Tracking System, MS Access test case database, test plans, test execution reports, and metrics.

• Created an automated regression test suite on multiple platforms using Silk Test.

• Evaluated performance automation tools (such as Silk Performer) for a web-based intranet application.

Education:

MBA Certification – Northeastern University

Bachelors Degree: Computer Science – Salem State College

Computer Skills:

MS Office MS Project, Contribute, Visio, Silk Test, Silk Performer, SQA Robot, WinRunner, MySQL, Oracle, Sybase, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox

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