Sivakumar Ganesan
Hello

I'm Sivakumar Ganesan

Quality Engineering Architect / Manager

A passionate tester, problem solver and an automation architect with over a decade of experience in developing innovative automation solutions and managing large-scale projects. As an advocate of enhancing quality in software using test automation, he has helped testers and organizations globally to become better at quality assurance. He brings along his vast hands-on experience working in 3 continents, 4 organizations, 5 countries, and a long list of clients in the Banking, e-Commerce, Publishing, Telecom, Airlines and Services industry.

Professional Skills

Automation Frameworks Behavioral Driven, Test-Driven, Data Driven, Page Object Model, Hybrid
Automation Tools Selenium WebDriver, Appium, UFT, LeanFT, Cucumber, Specflow, JMeter, Applitools, EggPlant AI, ConformIQ
Test Management Tools HP ALM, VSTS, VersionOne, Jira, Xray, Bugzilla, TestLink
Programming Languages Java, Python, Shell
Web Services SOAP, REST, Postman, Karate, RapidAPI, SOATest, Virtualize
Web Development Languages HTML, PHP, JavaScript
Other Languages XML, SQL, XSLT, JSON, VBScript, XQuery
Platforms Database (Oracle, MySQL, POstgreSQL, MongoDB),
Microsoft Azure, Application Server (Apache HTTP, Tomcat), Docker,
Web Development (Bootstrap),
Mobile (Android, IOS)
Big Data HPCC Systems/ECL, Mark Logic
CI-CD Jenkins, Git, Bitbucket, SonarQube, Maven, Gradle, Junit, TestNG
Reporting/Analytics Tools Tableau, Power BI, MicroStrategy, RapidMiner
Domain Experience Banking, Airlines, Publishing, Legal, e-Commerce, and Services

Work Experience

2021 - Present

Sr. QE Architect/Manager

CIBC

Spearhead the Quality Engineering practice for the Commercial Banking and Payments Technology. Modernize the test automation, test data management and non-production test environments management with a proactive, preventive approach to implement quality systems. With a mission to enhance productivity, quality and profitability across the delivery teams within the line of business, led the way in enhancing and implementing newer tools, standards, and best practices to QA including in-sprint test automation and model-based test development. Managed automation deliverables directly for Smart Business Banking, Cash Management Online, Payments Services Hub, Trade360 and many more.

2019-2021

Test Automation Architect

Scotiabank [TechMahindra]

Developed innovative test automation solutions to improve testing effectiveness, efficiency, minimize risks and costs. Managed the automation center of excellence for tools, and framework. Provided technical guidance and support to develop, implement and maintain automation test suites, tools, and technology stacks for several portfolios. Accountable for developing and maintaining the automation framework used by 350+ globally distributed associates. Improved test automation code quality multifold and led continuous testing initiatives for the group. Acted as a change agent; Provided thought leadership by researching best practices, conducting proof of concepts, and collaborating with other leaders in the testing competency. Helped with recruiting, train and mentor agilists and quality engineers for multiple clients across Canada.

2019

Technical Architect

Air Canada [Hexaware Technologies]

Spearheaded the development of functional and automation test strategy for two key areas namely customer data platform and the enterprise integration for Air Canada’s revamped loyalty program. Played a pivotal role at the start of this large transformation in building a holistic end-to-end test strategy for the program, improve testing efficiency, introducing agile process improvements, recruit and train associates in onshore and offshore, and help in aligning the strategic vendors/partners with the program goals. Introduced the API automation tools and techniques, integrated it with the existing framework to transform it into a single full-fledged end-to-end hybrid automation framework. Developed the test strategy and approach for an AI-driven cargo management system. Key architect in transforming their existing web automation framework into hybrid framework to enable robust end-to-end test automation.

2019

Test Automation Leader

OnX Canada

Led the quality assurance practice and kick-started the transformation of the predominantly manual test organization into an automation center of excellence. Built a robust and integrated test framework to validate the front-end web application, Sitecore, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud backend and their associated APIs using Behavioral Driven Development (BDD) approach for clients such as Alberta gaming, liquor, and cannabis commission, and Dexcom.

2016 - 2019

Test Automation Architect

Infosys Limited.

Agile Champion, aided in the smooth transformation of the testing organization into Agile. Defined automation test strategy and test approach for multiple large portfolios. Created advanced software test automation solutions for Big data testing. Responsible for overseeing the quality assurance of content fabrication and enrichment systems delivering content to client’s flagship web application. Managed a team of offshore testers who are validating and automating an NLP based entity recognition, linking and master data management system on a proprietary "Big Data" system named HPCC.

2012 - 2016

Technical Test Lead

Infosys Limited.

Responsible for the quality assurance of a flagship web application used by professionals globally for their legal research. Managed a globally distributed team of 15 testers in a multi-vendor environment, performing functional, regression, content-application integration and system integration tests on Web and Mobile applications.

2010 - 2012

Test Analyst

Infosys Limited.

Responsible for the quality assurance of a backend collection and conversion platform built for documents procured from vendors in different formats.

2009 - 2010

Associate - Projects

Cognizant Technology Solutions

Managed a team of five functional testers to validate the e-Sales and e-Services platform for a major broadcasting and telecommunication service provider in the UK.

2006 - 2009

Programmer Analyst

Cognizant Technology Solutions

Part of a quality assurance team which validated the CRM platform called “Chordiant” for a major broadcasting and telecommunication service provider in the UK.

Education

2017 - 2018

Master of Information Systems

Wright State University, Ohio, USA.

2011 - 2012

Post Graduate Diploma in Business and Corporate Law

SCDL, India.

2007 - 2010

Post Graduate Diploma in Business Administration

Finance and Human Resource Management

SCDL, India.

2002 - 2006

Bachelor of Engineering

Anna University, India.

Training & Certification

PMP

Project Management Professional

Project Management Institute.

PMI-ACP

Agile Certified Practitioner

Project Management Institute.

CTAL-TM

Certified Test Manager

ISTQB.

PSM I

Professional Scrum Master

Scrum.org

Training

Agile Boot Camp

TEK Systems, USA.

API Tester

Postman API Tester

Postman

NCFM

Certification in Financial Markets

National Stock Exchange of India.

MSDSC

Microsoft Dynamics

Microsoft.

References

  • Siva has been a strong contributor to our COE team. He is very open and honest with his messaging and has calm but effective approach to his communication. With his articulation and strong technical background he demonstrates his expertise convincingly. He takes the lead on getting things done and is very reliable. I would gladly have Siva in my team anytime. I would recommend him for any role where conscientiousness and results are required.

    navin
    Navin Balkaran Director Software Quality Assurance, Scotiabank
  • Siva and I worked together in Scotiabank’s QA Centre of Excellence for a little over one and half years; Siva was instrumental in setting up a Continuous Testing infrastructure for the QA teams and led several initiatives in enhancing and improving our automation frameworks and tools. I found Siva to be an amazing leader in QE practices and an excellent team member to work with; he brings with him a positive attitude and a perfect balance between technical and non-technical worlds. I look forward to working with Siva again in the future and wish him the best in his current and future endeavours. I recommend Siva to anybody looking to build a great QE team and improving their software QA processes.

    shashi
    Shashidhar Sreedhara Engineering Manager, Quality
  • I worked with Siva for 4+ years and HIGHLY recommend him for any role in QA (Functional or Automation) or any Leadership-oriented role in general. While the work relationship was customer/client, he was really a team member and a highly effective one at that. Siva was a leader to the team (both Onshore and Offshore), drove innovation within our team, communicated effectively (both up and down the chain), and could be relied on to help in any situation. He learned quickly, retained and utilized that knowledge, effectively passed on that knowledge to others on the team, and in general made the team and everyone around him better. He consistently made positive impacts on our projects. Siva was a true TEAM member and I would thoroughly enjoy working with him again.

    ron
    Ron Reazin Sr. Consulting Quality Engineer, LexisNexis, USA.
  • Siva combines Thought Leadership, Team Leadership, Strong Technical Abilities, Test Solution Architecture and Design along with Test Implementation. He was instrumental in leading the transformation of my organization from Waterfall to Agile methodology. Siva established standards for Gherkin, trained the onsite and offshore staff on it in addition to Selenium Java, established the structures for SVN and Maven, integration with Cucumber and Jenkins for automated execution. Within 8 months, we successfully transitioned a staff of 50+ testers into Hybrid Functional/Automation test engineers who achieved 80%+ In Sprint User Story automation. I would highly recommend Siva for any Leadership role in IT.

    paul
    Paul Marchant Manager - Quality Assurance, LexisNexis, USA.
  • It was an absolute pleasure working with Siva. He's an exceptional and dedicated individual. Siva has a flair in team leadership; complete knowledge and command on tools and software; brings in an undeniable acumen on the projects he delivered. We worked and delivered some amazing projects. He does his homework thoroughly on his team and clients alike. Siva puts his team on the pedestal, a quality rarely seen in such an agile industry.

    venkat
    Venkata Chaitanya, MBA, CSM Project Manager, Bell Canada
  • Sivakumar is a dedicated and professional tester who is hugely reliable. What makes him stand out for me is his ability to learn (and prove it through asking further questions) in order to facilitate his testing. I recommend him highly, and would happily work with him again in future.

    ammar
    Ammar Hassan Senior QA Lead, British Sky Broadcasting, UK.
  • Siva is a great leader and has huge influence over his team. He strives hard to bring quality to QA processes and practices. He is known to motivate his fellow colleagues and earned lot of respect over the years. He is one of the most knowledgeable person I have known. He is the person to go to for any technical aspects of a process. He always think to automate any time consuming work and helped in developing lot of automation tools. He is definitely an asset to any company he works for.

    poorna
    Poorna Chandra Prasad Test Analyst, Infosys, India.
  • I am blessed to get Siva as my Test Lead. He sets clear expectations from every individual in the team and provides timely feedback in a way that motivates me to work and learn many processes and tools. He has a lot of respect in the team and was one of the most trusted resources to go to for any technical\process related questions.

    dhamo
    Dhamotharan PK Test Analyst, Infosys, India.
  • Sivakumar is always dedicated in service. His key strength stands to be his core understanding of the expectations. Besides the commitment made, he walks through extra miles in delivery. Highly enthusiastic team player. Effective in managing crisis situations.

    preethi
    Preethi Sekar Senior QA Lead, Infosys, India.
  • Sivakumar is a skilled IT professional in the area of Software Testing. Hold good track record for his contribution in Quality engineering and assurance. He would be an asset to any organization and team.

    suresh
    Sureshkumar Sundaram Senior Project Manager, Cognizant, USA.

Key Achievements

Agile Automation Framework

Advanced BDD Framework v2.0

D.A.V.I.S

Shift Left

Integrate BDD with ALM

Automated Bug Reporting

Test Data Identifier

Test Link Bridge

Static Document Compare

Agile Dashboard

System Health Report

AI - Predict and Resolve Issues

Sentiment Analytics

Behavioral Driven Automation Framework

Developed this plain vanilla automation framework using open source tools for a client when their organization moved from a waterfall to agile methodology. The Behavioral driven development using Gherkin and Cucumber replaced the legacy automation framework. It brought in transparency and high reuse, enabling progressive automation within the sprints. Achieved ~80% in-sprint automation across teams within 6 months.

Advanced BDD Framework v2.0

While the cucumber framework increases re-use and reduces effort spent in result analysis, considerable effort is still required in running them as data-driven tests. Implemented a cucumber hook that enables defining the test data instructions rather than actual test data in the test case. It will dynamically pull the test data in runtime and pass it to the test case there by reducing effort spent in test data preparation. Introduced automatic bug tracking as well to further reduce the overheads in the testing processes.

Data Adaptive Virtual Intelligence System (D.A.V.I.S)

In most cases, the Test Automation has been limited to automating the manual test cases to replicate an user's action. I wanted to change this and implemented NLP techniques to analyze test logs, and previously found bugs to identify test data. Further, create "Smart Data" using techniques like pattern recognition and prioritization to eliminate redundant test data and improve test effectiveness. With the new AI platform, enabled continuous learning and adapt with each test run.

Shift Left

For a client, due to the complexity of all components coming together early, 90% of their content testing was forced to happen using the front end application. As a result, there wasn't enough time to fix the issues in the upstream components. Introduced an automation approach and developed a tool that can be used to validate content without the need for an user interface. As a result, 70% of content testing was shifted left and ended up finding ~65% defects earlier. Test coverage also increased by 250%., Yes! its two hundred and fifty percent. My analogy on importance of early testing is given above.

BDD & ALM Integration

Reduced the manual effort involved in test case management by introducing an automated process for handling new and updated tests whenever someone checks-in their changes to the central repository. The custom test case management script pulls the tests, apply pre-defined rules, transform them and upload them to an ALM tool automatically. The living document generator also gets updated. If there are issues with the Gherkin tests, any parsing the users are also notified.

Automated Bug Tracking

Simplified the process of result analysis and bug reporting by introducing the automated bug logging and tracking. In addition to the test logs, the application logs are also validated for any errors and bugs are logged without a person manually looking at it.

Test Data Identifier

To reduce the manual effort spent in writing queries everytime and retrieving required test data from a BigData repository, created a standalone tool with the most widely used options throughout the organization. The tool uses XQUERY to search the MarkLogic repository and returns a sub-zero second search result with required data. It is widely used across the organization with over 100 users spread across the globe.

Test Link Bridge

Created a standalone utility to transform the gherkin tests and upload to a test management tool like TestLink. It also enables migration of test cases from one tool to another. Example: HP ALM to TestLink. Implemented in three different portfolios for a client and 50+ users.

Static Doc Compare

Instead of validating individual documents explicitly for every feature implemented, introduced the process of comparing the pre and post deployment versions of the same document. If there are no differences found, we could confidently certify that nothing is broken from regression standpoint in the most efficient way. Only the differences that is not expected (not in the known difference list) needs to be investigated.

Agile Dashboard

Resolved the problem of not having enough test metrics in AGILE projects by developing a custom dashboard with Apache, MySQL and PHP. Dashboard gets the data from tools like VSTS, VersionOne and automated test logs. The dashboard provides valuable trends that enable data-driven decision making.

Real-Time System Health Report

Introduced a health report for different systems using the BVT and Smoke test results already setup for individual components. It helps the development, test engineers and managers access real-time system availability.

Auto-Resolve Bugs

Even though hundreds of production tickets and internal defects are handled everyday, most organizations do not have any visualization of this data to enable data driven decision making. I developed a tickets analysis and automatic ticket resolution system by orchestrating a number of carefully selected open source tools.

Customer Sentiments Analytics

One of the common problems in large organizations is the non-availability of a generic platform to generate analytics from unstructured data. For example, the customer sentiments are not available from user comments, feedback, production tickets and any other unstructured data which might provide valuable insight on the current state of products. I built a text analytics platform which takes any unstructured data as input and provide required insights based on the data type.

Loading ...