VisualCV

Overview

Third employee of a Ruby on Rails, Web 2.0 startup aimed at building the best professional, online representation of an individual. You are reading a VisualCV right now! For more information about the company, visit the VisualCV home page or watch the VisualCV In Plain English video.

My Role

Led a team of three testers in a hands on testing position, in a fully Agile environment. Our approach to development didn't strictly follow one Agile paradigm, but our methodology most closely mimicked Scrum.

Day to day operations included morning stand up meetings, development of user stories and their implementation using a Cucumber/WaTIR framework, manual test case definition and execution, and defect reporting & verification.

I participated as a member of senior management team responsible for defining product strategy & roadmap, making personnel decisions, and contributing to business model development and definition, among other things.

Environment

The VisualCV product is developed entirely in Ruby on Rails. The product runs on Mongrel app servers on Linux, fronted by Apache web servers, and backed by a Postgres database. All test, staging, and production environments are hosted, and Capistrano is in use for all deployments.

All product development staff are standardized on the Mac/OS X platform. We utilized various different SaaS products to conduct our daily business, such as:

• Unfuddle - Subversion and Git hosting, defect tracking, milestone management, wiki
• Basecamp - Document management
• Campfire - Group chat
• Textmate - IDE
• VMWare Fusion - Virtual machine used for running Windows
• Jing - Recording screencasts
• Skitch - Screen captures and annotations

Responsible for quality of all of Plateau's software products. Managed a team of approximately 26 testers and managers in the U.S. and Bangalore, India.

• Director of the Automation team, responsible for infusing efficiencies into webMethods' Product Development organization
• Implemented automated solutions using webMethods products and open-source third-party tools
• Managed a distributed team across multiple time zones, including Bangalore, the Bay area, Seattle, Denver, and Fairfax
• Automated much of the Release Engineering activities, using tools like Ant, Cruise Control, and JUnit

• Responsible for quality of all webMethods' software and processes
• Managed a team of 34 test professionals and managers in 5 different offices across the US, comprising 20+ individual products
• Led team to implement automation strategies using various tools to reduce manual test case execution
• Interfaced with QA team in our India Development Center in Bangalore, India
• Responsible for measuring quality effectiveness and driving quality improvement initiatives across the organization