Connor O. Roberts
214.340.5244 · [email protected] · linkedin.com/in/connorroberts
QUALITY ASSURANCE MANAGEMENT
Hands-on, results oriented Quality Assurance professional with extensive experience planning, testing, and integrating complex distributed systems for the purpose of risk analysis and mitigation. Management of projects through all phases, utilizing multiple engineering disciplines in establishing a definition of quality that balances internal stakeholder requests as well as customer desires. Proven track record of meeting and exceeding customer expectations via the on-time deliverables. Strong ability to bridge gap between business management and technical teams.
- Strategic Planning
- Risk Analysis & Metrics
- Test Strategy & Tooling
- Program/Project Management
- Continuous Integration & Development
- Process Improvement
- Budgeting/Forecasting/Cost Analysis/P&L
- On-Shoring & Off- Shoring Management
- Contract Negotiations & Administration
- Organizational Development/Management
SELECTED BUSINESS CONTRIBUTIONS
- Evaluated existing tech stack and led teams to self-prescribe new and innovative automation tooling/strategies that better fit their individual product contexts, including: Robot Framework, Selenium WebDriver, paired various BDD frameworks, such as Cucumber, JBehave and others with Java, .NET, Python, etc.
- Introduced new Heuristic-based models for both blackbox and automation-based risk analysis, garnered adoption across multiple release trains, allowing Product and Project management teams to be more situationally aware of how development teams’ automation strategy paired with ongoing business goals. Combined efforts with third-party testing services, such as uTest / Applause, Qualitest and Rainforest QA to balance testing efforts across product divisions.
- Revised testing procedures, replaced tooling and streamlined test documentation, converted test cases and plans into value-add risk awareness tooling for Product Management, generated new frameworks and guidelines for smoke testing, build acceptance and regression testing, leading to shorter build verification times.
- Worked with development teams to implement and maintain multiple environments enabling concurrent development and quality assurance testing, increasing number of reported risks earlier in the process, while decreasing testing efforts in environments as teams moved toward production.
- Increased revenue flow by proposing the addition of a “Wizard” into the IS software to reach a previously ignored product parallel. This “CORE” software targeted a previously neglected demographic, multi-site adoption within six months, renewing of integration service contracts providing a wider net for partner-OEM clients who could now take over formerly unreachable sites that utilized competing solutions.
- Increased corporate profit by proposing strengthening licensing procedure for the Intelli-Site (IS) software. Most changes were implemented within a six month development window from initial proposal.
- Proficient in regression modeling, via six key guideline components: Core, Chronic, Configuration, Recent, Risky, Repaired. Use of risk-analysis models to maintenance both installable-OS and Web-based applications.
- Thorough experiencing throughout all levels of the Quality Assurance engineering career path, including but not limited to: SQA methodologies, test planning, test cases, scripting, documentation, regression/UI/UX testing, performance/load/stress testing, QA/QC standards, defect/bug tracking, HP Quality Center/UFT, PMP tools (Jira, Salesforce, VersionOne, Rally) as well as test administration (QMetry, QASymphony QTest, TestRail, etc.)
- Increased company’s global presence by becoming a featured conference speaker at STPCon (Fall 2016, Spring 2017), generating thought-leadership through blog creation, community engagement, client outreach projects and networking associations (DFW Testers MeetUp, Conferences, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc). Led domestic and international training, operations, on-site/remote configuration and testing.
- Inspires coworkers/teams to drive toward common goals, can contribute individually, make decisions in the face of unknowns, translate progress up to executive level and coordinate operations without ongoing supervision. Very skilled at research, analytics, data gathering and the critical thinking needed to organize teams to solve complex problems.
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Dealertrack Technologies (A Cox Automotive Company) – Dallas, TX, 2013 – Oct 2016
Quality Assurance Manager
Owned the Quality process across multiple teams and solution groups. Managed the testing and quality aspects of the development lifecycle within enterprise class system software development. Built out and managed a high performance, high quality Testing team, including: hiring, setting up test environments and defining good practices to ensure productivity and quality testing. Worked with engineering, support and product management to define and execute better testing, so that we can better inform our stakeholders who can then better mitigate product risks, resolve issues and increase customer confidence in the quality of our product.
Quality Assurance Engineer
Within an Agile environment, I had the benefit of working directly with developers. Code changes were transparent across the team with constant communication as a daily part of our workflow. Activities included: Multi-environment testing, sprint planning/tracking, shared decision making with Product Management team, customer advocacy, defect verification and release planning and execution.
Deltan Group, Inc. – Dallas, TX, 2011 – 2013
Network Consultant
Directed interaction with managed-service provider customers to make determinations on software and hardware needs for their given environments. Heavy experience evaluating various contexts to determine support, software and hardware requirements. Troubleshooting and testing of Microsoft Dynamics products (Solomon/AX) accounting/financial software suite.
Intelli-Site (OSSI) – Dallas, TX, 2008 – 2011
Quality Assurance Manager
Partnered with software development teams to improve application quality and reduce time to delivery. Worked with internal management as well as external business partners to understand and execute on requirements and expected deliverables. Ensured consistency across multiple teams, by recommendation of testing and reporting tools, sharing of best practices, both manual and automated. Maintained and customized test procedure work flow to increase efficiency while decreasing delivery time. Created and documented client/field defect verification and build acceptance test process.
EDUCATION
Bachelor’s Degree, Art & Technology (ATEC), University of Texas at Dallas – Dallas, TX
Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas – Dallas, TX
SKILLS
Metrics · CDT Driven Quality Management · Rapid Software Testing · Product Quality Management · Web Technologies · Project Management · Presentation/Microsoft Office
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Leadership Training · Quality Engineering · Context-Driven Risk Mitigation · CDT Thought Leader · Automation · Virtualization/Cloud Computing · Mobile Strategies · Robot Framework · Selenium Web Driver · RST Peer Advisor
ADDITIONAL PROFESSIONAL STRATEGIES
Team Management:
Experience managing unified scrum, as well as divided teams, using various strategies with people spread across many software development environments; both offshore and onshore/co-located teams. Familiar strategies include Waterfall, Agile, Kanban, and others. Heavy focus on the three main motivators that create healthy team members: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Familiarity with bridging the gap between development teams and upper management, specifically in translating the needs of the business for team consumption.
Talent Placement & Budgeting:
Solid understanding of how to build out long running and highly functional teams, with focus on quality throughout the entire product development process. Able to mitigate budget concerns, while still bringing in the necessary talent needed to make projects and teams successful. Created and established hiring practices that served as a boiler plate when adopted as the go-to model used by other managers across various divisions.
Risk Analysis & Metrics:
Strong experience in exposing and evaluating risk from a stakeholder perspective by working directly with product management teams to help the business make more informed decisions about how to react to perceived value-threats to the product. Familiarity with software maturity models and testing standards, such as ISO 29119, V-Model, Cynefin, TMM/TMMi, and how to balance those in unison with the strengths of context-driven testing and quality practices. Skill in using smart metrics and measurements to achieve KPIs where applicable, giving both teams and upper management transparency into both product and process quality across platforms.
Test Strategy & Tooling:
Deep tacit and explicit knowledge generating holistic test strategies that expose risk to produce high priority bug finds. Long-term experience coaching teams how to create value-add artifacts through the use of guideword heuristics (fallible methods for solving a problem or producing an informed action) coupled with software oracles (the method by which we recognize and identify problems). Effective in working with multi-layered organizations to implement automation where necessary.
Modeling:
Deeply skilled in how to introduce new ways of thinking, including the use of explicit testing models, both available within the organization as well as those from the larger external community. Strong ability in training teams to convert mental process into translatable value-add testing artifacts that are immediately useful to Product Management and other stakeholders. Appropriate contextual models challenge existing biases, decrease risk, and increase confidence in product quality.
Session Based Test Management (SBTM):
Effectiveness of exploratory testing; while unscripted, replies on using explicit models to inform thinking for the purpose of testing in an effective manner. By teaching teams how to execute SBTM, risks are more tangible. By putting a framework around each exploratory test session via testing charters, time-boxing and debriefings, teams can expose more valuable risks. SBTM also allows for focusing/defocusing techniques that have been shown to empower teams to find higher priority risks.
Scrum / Agile:
Practical experience working within multiple teams across many release trains in multiple disparate product divisions. Familiarity in using business process models (e.g. “SAFe”) as guidelines to scale Agile practices appropriately throughout an organization.