Yulia Starchenko

Company Overview: Firstt digital healthcare staffing marketplace for clinicians; named #1 fastest-growing staffing company by SIA in 2023.

• Led cross-functional teams of engineers, associate QA managers with the manual team, automation, and product to improve the quality of released solutions by 65% within the first three weeks through streamlined workflows and enhanced collaboration across geographically distributed Scrum teams.
• Established release readiness criteria, held teams accountable for quality metrics, reduced post-release defects by 25%, and improved customers' feedback within the first 3-4 weeks.
• Consistently re-evaluated build-vs-buy decisions during each stage of the company's growth over four years, saving an average of $75,000 to $120,000 annually in contract costs.
• Developed executive dashboards to track defect density, test coverage, and release success, achieving a 25% product quality improvement, higher customer satisfaction, and a 40% drop in the number of support tickets through targeted actions and process enhancements over three sprints.
• Led cross-team incident investigations (postmortems) and root cause analysis, driving an 80% reduction in issue recurrence by implementing automation solutions and strengthening preventive measures.
• Built and led a QA team of nine manual and four automation engineers in 2.5 months, aligning with growth objectives.
• Authored onboarding materials and led training, reducing new hire ramp-up time by 50%, and minimizing team disruptions.

Company Overview: A marketing and customer engagement platform built on top of the IBM Watson Marketing platform to create personalized experiences based on intent and real-time behavior across email and mobile campaigns.

• Expanded Automation Coverage: Increased test automation coverage from 60% to 85%, leveraging tools like Selenium WebDriver, RestAssured, and TestNG to improve product reliability, and reduce manual testing efforts.
• Accelerated Delivery and Reduced Costs: Spearheaded Agile adoption by defining DoD and Acceptance Criteria, shortening delivery cycles, lowering defect rates, and increasing team productivity by 30%, while implementing a zero-bug policy that minimized development costs.
• Introduced API Testing Automation: Established API testing and automation frameworks, enabling early bug detection, and significantly enhancing release quality.
• DevOps Integration: Automated application deployments using CI tools such as Jenkins and UrbanCode Deploy, streamlining release pipelines, and aligning DevOps practices with QA objectives.
• Leadership in Agile Practices: Served as Scrum Master and Agile Advocate, fostering cross-functional collaboration, enhancing team efficiency, and driving the delivery of high-quality, on-time releases.

Company Overview: IBM's Watson Customer Experience Analytics product is an AI-powered platform that provides businesses with actionable insights into customer behaviors, journeys, and interactions across digital channels to enhance user experience and drive engagement.

• Defined and implemented QA and test automation strategies to support team growth and evolving product needs.
• Developed robust test automation frameworks for web and native (iOS and Android) applications, reducing release times by 75% throughout the first few sprints.
• Led postmortems and root cause analysis for critical incidents, implementing targeted test automation and QA process improvements that reduced issue recurrence by 80%, and enhanced overall system stability within the next 2-3 sprints.
• Automated CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions, integrated Slack notifications for real-time feedback, reducing deployment cycle times by over 250%, and providing instant feedback within the same PR.
• Designed and implemented an in-house test automation framework using Selenium, TestNG, and Java, achieving a 45% reduction in release cycles, and significantly enhancing delivery efficiency within the first three months of deployment.
• Authored, executed, and maintained test automation scripts, increasing automation coverage from 30% to 92% within 5 months.
• Optimized CI/CD pipeline, reducing execution time by 20% (from 30 to 24 minutes), and accelerating feedback cycles within one sprint.
• Reduced regression defects by 15% through the implementation of continuous testing practices and a shift-left testing approach, enhancing overall product quality and early defect detection.
• Developed test strategies, plans, and cases in collaboration with stakeholders, enhancing alignment with the roadmap, and improving the quality of deliverables throughout each release cycle.
• Marketing and customer engagement platform built on top of the IBM Watson Marketing platform to create personalized experiences based on intent and real-time behavior across email and mobile campaigns.