Ioana Prundaru

Professional Profile

Highly skilled tri-lingual IT manager with strong software testing and test automation, development skills, as well as process management and process optimization experience.

Management expertise: People management, personnel responsibility of up to 30 specialists, on two hierarchical levels, technical management, management of IT projects, problem solving, conflict management and resolution.

Technical expertise:

• Subject matter expert at conceptual, strategic level in test process, tools and automation, continuous process improvement and cost reduction

• Strong experience in requirements engineering, development and testing of complex applications for banking, image processing, pattern recognition

• Process management and optimization. CMMI, ITIL, Operational Excellence (Six Sigma)

• Hands-on technical management experience

Industry : Banking, Stock Exchange, Image Processing, Pattern Recognition

Communication experience: Lectured on Configuration Management. Wrote articles on Pattern Recognition. Held presentations on testing, test automation. Workshop moderation

International experience: Extensive professional and leadership experience in Switzerland, Japan, Germany. Provided training and consulting in UK and USA.

Languages: Fluent in English, German, French, Italian limited

Memberships,

Affiliations

• Member of "Swiss Testing Board", the Swiss branch of ISTQB - “International Software Testing Qualifications Board”

• Member of ISTQB Working Party “Expert Level Test Automation”, co-author of the syllabus for expert level Test Automation

• “Gerson Lehrman Group Councils”

Education

Experience and Achievements

02.2009 – 11.2009 Avaloq Zurich, Switzerland Head Test Services

Technical and line management of the Test Services, responsible with the strategic and operative lead of all internal and external testing services. Managed 30 specialists (4 team Heads, as direct reports) grouped in four teams: Test Management, System Test, Test Automation, Performance Test.

• Defined and implemented test process optimization measures

• Spearheaded the business initiative to sell test services to “Avaloq” banks or consulting firms.

• Defined and launched a new service, Test Consulting and promoted the existing ones: automated testing frameworks, test training.

• Organized presentations for potential clients, liaised with account managers

• Defined new partnership models, to improve collaboration with the consulting firms

• Succeeded in acquiring 2 new clients and one partner.

• Defined the 2010-2013 vision for Avaloq Test Services and the road map for 2010

• Member in the Avaloq Quality Board, coordinated the reporting to clients for major releases

• The upgrading of the tools Quality Center, QTP and Clearcase was delayed and needed more budget. I have initiated and lead a Task Force to coordinate the migration. Succeeded to finalize the upgrading in time and without extra budget.

02.2005 - 12.2008 Credit-Suisse, Zurich Assistant Vice-President

2007–2008 Sub-Department Test Manager "Securities and Treasury Ops" STOS.

In the newly created leadership role led numerous initiatives across the sub-department to improve the test process. Managed 30 test specialists, organized in 2 teams.

Drove a one year transformation of the testing process in the sub-department, from an uncoordinated, inefficient to a state-of-the art testing organization. Introduced rigorous testing standards and methods for the sub-department.

• Analyzed all areas of test process, identified improvement opportunities, using the TPI (Sogeti) model. Successfully implemented improvement measures in three waves, over one year. Ensured adherence to the defined measures. Defined KPIs to track progress.

• Reported KPIs for Testing, QM and Support monthly to the sub-department management. Addressed and resolved the identified deficiencies

• Conducted proactive meetings and reviews in support of the regular test campaigns

• Drove automation effort. Liaised with project managers to introduce Test Automation in three new projects, which lead to a great reduction of the testing effort. Organized a Test Automation booth at the CS IT Expo 2008 in Zurich

• Successfully standardized the set-up in the Quality-Center tool, across all projects, thus substantially reducing the effort in the calculation of metrics and reporting

• Conceived and launched a skills-development plan, including an on-boarding plan for new-comers and a tracking and reporting tool for training and certifications. Defined the curriculum. 90% of testers got certified at foundation level (ISTQB) within first year

• Initiated and lead key-initiatives: "Implementation of testing Standards", "Offshore Testing Models", "Sensitive Data and Offshoring"

Contributed in key bank-wide initiatives:

• Provided expert know-how for the implementation of CMMI Level 2 and 3

• "Subject Matter expert" in “Expert Test Team" (ETT), SharePoint collaboration

• Head of the ETT-Work Group, in charge with defining new bank-wide testing roles

• Member in Credit Suisse "Project Review Board", Testing discipline. Conducted reviews and signed-off the test documents of the projects.

2005 – 2007 Sub-Department (Ressort) Test Manager "Credits"

Technical lead - “Credit” test organization, 16 test specialists, in 4 geographically distributed teams

• Defined and implemented the test strategy, methods, guidelines in the sub-department

• Defined and followed-up long-term improvement measures for the testing process. Introduced KPIs to assess test process efficiency and effectiveness

• Coordinated testing campaigns, verified and signed-off test reports. Organized and lead “End-to-End” testing of all Credit applications for two major test campaigns

• Initiated platforms for know-how sharing, such as an Intranet page for testing, Wiki pages as Testing Knowledge Repository. Delivered technical presentations, published own articles.

• Lead the testing stream in key Credit Suisse-wide Programs: Basel II, as test manager of the whole program, over 20 projects, EPLI (new PL1), UNO

10.2004 – 02.2005 Afora International, Zurich Manager Product Development

Short-term contract. Planning, design, development of original Bridge software for Configuration Management on Tandem platforms. Consulted for Change Management; prepared, held trainings and workshops at “Tuft Insurance”, Boston, USA and “Surrey Satellite Technologies Ltd – SSTL”, UK. Technologies used: UNIX, Windows, Tortoise, WinCVS, Cygwin, ChangeMan DS (Serena), Tandem.

12.2003 – 04.2004 Phonak AG , Staefa Senior Test Engineer

Short-term contract. Planning, design of System Tests in a RUP project for Hearing Instrument Fitting software. Evaluated tools for test automation. TeamTrack (Serena), VMWare.

12. 2000 – 09. 2003 SWX Swiss Exchange, Zurich Senior Test Engineer, Test Automation

Technical lead of 3 test automation engineers. Spearheaded the development of automated data-driven testing solutions for critical Stock Exchange applications. Defined strategy, process and the Road Map of Test Automation in SWX. Analyzed feasibility, estimated ROI for TA. Conceived and delivered innovative Test Automation solutions for efficient, cost-saving testing.

• Analyzed requirements, designed, developed a Test Automation framework (ca 60.000 lines of code). Managed the Change Requests and the monthly releases of test framework

• Developed and implemented following test automation products, based on the framework:

• Sanity Check for SWX and Virt-X Trading System (Pilot Project)

• Regression Test for SWX- and Virt-X Trading Systems

• Sanity Check for the “SWX Market Supervision”

• Achieved a reduction of the testing effort (automated vs manual testing) of 90% for Regression Testing and 75% for the Sanity Checking. Achieved a break-even point after only 2 runs for the Regression Testing and after 7 runs for the Sanity Check.

• Reviewed specification-, architecture-, design- and code documents; held user trainings and technical presentations on test automation; wrote technical documentation. MS Project, MS Office,PowerPoint, Visio, Documentum; Clearcase, PVCS, WinRunner,Java Add-Ins

1999 - 2000 Credit Suisse First Boston, Zurich Computer Scientist

Independent project work, as consultant for “Computer People”.

Lead the introduction of XML technology for FOA (Front Office Application). Successfully implemented XML as standard for data transfer among the modules of the Trading System. Defined the guidelines, performed the evaluation of new technologies for XML parsing (DOM and SAX libraries). Analyzed Trading System requirements, designed, developed, tested and implemented in production parsers for XML files. Technologies: DOM library, XML, XSL, DTD, HTML, C, C++, Perl, Clearcase,

1996 - 1998 Siemens Post Automation Konstanz, Germany Analyst-Developer

Independent project development

Address Dictionary Databases division

Designed, developed country specific database applications for the Address Data Management (ADM). Lead the Slovakia, South Africa and Austria ADM projects.

Pattern Recognition division

• Defined new, original algorithms. Developed pattern recognition applications to improve error rate and read rate and to reduce "noise"

• Optimized existing pattern recognition software and achieved 10% improvement of read rate in the China Project. Technologies used: UNIX ,C, Oracle, Oracle PL-SQL,RCS, awk, emacs, Codemanager, SCCS, vi, Purify, dbx, Latex, various image processing tools.

1994 - 1995 Merrill Lynch Investment Bank Tokyo Japan Senior Software Consultant

Quantitative Equity Trading Group

Independently designed, developed and implemented complex quantitative trading applications:

• several applications for modeling following financial data:

• stock volatility, using on Black-Scholes model

• warrants behavior, based on Whaley model

• stock tracking error against Nikkei225 index

• a complex financial application for daily volatility forecasting

Portfolio Management Group

• Designed, developed, tested, installed core modules for the Portfolio Management:‘Volume Report’,“Stock bid/ask approximation”,“Start-of-the-day”,‘End of the Day’

• Designed and implemented a Market Data User Interface

Technologies used: C/UNIX, Sybase, Open Client DB-Library C, TIB API (Teknekron).

1991 - 1994 Graphica Computer Corporation,Tokyo Japan Project Leader and Team Leader

Special Software Development Division

Team leader of 5 software engineers. Project leader in image processing projects.

• Hands-on lead the requirements analysis, design, development, implementation of complex image processing and computer graphics projects: CAD application for MacOS and UNIX, an HDTV monitoring application, a land map correction software.

• Author of new computer graphics algorithms for ‘loop vector’ in scanned land maps.

• Technologies: UNIX, C, OSF/Motif, Pascal, FORTRAN, MacOS-System7, MPW-C, GLSP Graphical Library. SUN Sparc, HP Apollo, Sumitomo, Macintosh Quadra.

Publications

• “On Fuzzy Filters for Pattern Recognition”, Proceedings of ICARCV, 1992 Singapore.

• “Syntactic Handwritten Numeral Recognition by Multidimensional Grammars”, Proceedings of  “12^th SPIE Symposium on Acquisition, Tracking and Pointing XII”, 15-16 April 1998, Orlando, Florida, USA

• “Syntactic Numerical Recognition Using Programmed Attributed Grammars”, Proceedings of  “The Fifth Joint Conference on Information Sciences”, Feb.27-March 3, 2000, Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA.

• “A Syntactic Approach for Numeral Recognition”,  Proceedings of “Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems ACIVS-2000”, August 3-4, 2000, Baden-Baden, Germany

• “Inference Process of Programmed Attributed  Regular Grammars for Character Recognition”, Proceedings of “13^th International Symposium on Electronic Imaging 2001”, 21-26 January 2001, San Jose, California, USA

• “An Example for Syntactic Character Recognition “, Proceedings of  the “26^th Annual Congress of the American Romanian Academy”, 25-29 July 2001, Montreal, Canada

• “On Syntactic Character Recognition Using Attributes”, Proceedings of the “Fifth International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information Engineering Systems & Allied Technologies”, 6-8 September 2001,Osaka, Japan