1. Last update on January 19, 2017
Dr Ganesh Neelakanta Iyer PhD, NUS, Singapore
ganesh.vigneswara@gmail.com · +91.9676466377 · ganeshniyer Linkedin, Twitter, FaceBook
105, Girija Residency · Chanda Nagar · Hyderabad · India · 500050 · http://ganeshniyer.com
Summary
Creative geek with roots in software quality, a deep prod-
uct/technology evangelist in nature and a passion for adding
value by delivering quality software in agile manner.
Dr Ganesh is a QA Architect at Progress with more than
twelve years of research and development experience.
He has been instrumental in designing and developing
various QA web automation frameworks at Progress.
Some of them include a model driven framework and
very recently POM based test automation framework
on top of Selenium using TypeScript. As an agile prac-
titioner, he is active in various phases of agile software
development life cycle.
He has been a key resource in several product as well
as QA CoE initiatives at Progress such as 24x7 test au-
tomation framework and mechanism, robustness strat-
egy for a cloud product, cloud integration testing and
security test initiative.
He is extremely passionate about taking the prod-
ucts to its next level by product and technology evange-
lism at all possible opportunities. As part of that he is
very active in various industry and academic forums by
giving talks, workshops, mentoring students in premier
institutes to work on Progress products etc. He is also
a visiting faculty at IIIT-Hyderabad for more than three
years.
Experience
Progress Hyderabad, India
QA Architect, Product/Technology Evangelist Feb ’16 – present
Progress is a product company which offers several cloud and mobile software products. As a QA
Architect, Dr Ganesh’s key responsibilities include automation framework design for web products,
developing strategies and reviewing strategies for key product QA initiatives as well as for QA CoE
initiatives, review test strategies and quality profiles for key features, cross-team collaboration, de-
livering sessions on the products at various customer/partner conferences across the globe, driving
the efforts to build product PoC’s for field, conducting competitive analysis for products/features
and product/technology evangelism. As an agile practitioner, Dr Ganesh is closely involved in sprint
reviews and organizing retrospectives and giving pro-active feedback.
Major achievements
• Robustness initiative for Rollbase which is a cloud platform for rapid application development
• Enabling QA CoE for security testing by educating team leads on security test aspects through weekly
teasers, introducing right tools for static and dynamic analysis and establishing a process in agile life
cycle specifically with security focus for all our cloud products
• POM (Page Object Model) based test automation framework on top of Selenium using TypeScript
• Test approach for high-availability feature for aPaaS cloud platform product Rollbase
• Leading the efforts for PoC’s requested by field for multi-product integration scenarios
• Cross-team collaboration with teams from Europe and USA on a regular basis to exchange QA ideas,
practices and knowledge
• Lead for common component specification for one of the major Progress products with cross-team,
customer collaboration across the globe
• Several talks on Cloud testing at various industry conferences, customer/partner forums; Published a
book chapter on cloud testing in Encyclopedia of Cloud Computing; Several blog posts, white papers
and scholarly articles on this topic.
• Participate actively in design discussions for various features/releases for the cloud platform Rollbase
• Customer bug analysis for our Cloud platform product and lead the team to implement the action items
• Mentoring one of the key customers as part of Progress Architect Council for better customer connect
with Progress
• Successfully completed an architectural grooming program for some key senior QA engineers. Key
results include 200+ blog posts, 200+ forum posts, several PoCs, competitive analysis, white papers, test
strategies and quality profiles.
• Mentoring Progress incubator startups as well as internal teams to develop their applications on our
cloud platform. Some of those apps include DevOps ticketing system app, ProdOps employee allocation
app and HR apps.

2. • Pro actively analyze current QA processes and practices and suggest appropriate changes - e.g. Analyzed
how different teams within QA CoE write test plans and suggested an approach to effectively manage
and maintain test plans
• Maintains a big-picture view of a product and actively review team’s work and give guidance on various
QA aspects
• Use customer/partner forums and conferences to interact with customers, understand the product usage
and suggest QA team with appropriate action items to fill the gap
• Provide active mentoring to many team members (both at junior level and at senior level) to groom them
technically as well as on their soft skills
• Analyze bugs (both internal and external), identify QA focus areas based on bug analysis based on
customer usage and product market focus and derive QA priority areas based on it
• Presented several talks on QA best practices, product use cases, technology talks etc. at customer/partner
conferences in USA, Australia and India
Major evangelism efforts
• Session on Docker 101 - How docker works and how you can use it for development, test and production
at Progress Exchange Conference, Sydney, Australia, July 2016
• Accepted a session on Continuous Testing at premier STAREAST conference due in May 2017 at Florida,
USA
• Accepted a session on low code app development platforms at 19th CloudExpo at Santa Clara, USA in
November 2016
• Webinars on progress products and technologies at a global (UK-based) industry forum - Brighttalk
• Contributed two book chapters (One is on Cloud Testing and the other one on Cloud Brokers) in
Encyclopedia on cloud computing published by Wiley publications
• Hands-on session on building satellite application on top of an existing application at Progress Exchange
customer conference at Sydney, Australia, July 2016
• Driven several PoC efforts in understanding the requirements, translating into the design specifications,
delivering successful PoC implementations and give it back to field for many prospects
• Talk to customers and prospects in various industry conference and evangelize various Progress products
to them whenever an opportunity exists - some of them are successfully converted as partners/customers
• Hands-on session on building satellite application on top of an existing application at Progress User
Group conference at Manchester, USA, June 2016
• Session on Simplify Enterprise IT with No Code Application - aPaaS at Progress Exchange conference in
Mumbai, November 2016
• Session on Cloud Testing at STeP-IN 2016 and in Great Indian Developer Summit both in Bengaluru, 2016
• Student guidance at IIIT-Hyderabad for doing projects using Progress cloud and mobile products and
technologies
• Sessions and workshops on emerging technologies and Progress products at various academic institutions
• Internal product training sessions for employees from various departments at company head quarters in
Boston in 2016
• Manning Progress booth at many industry events in Hyderabad and Bengaluru and help prospects
understand more about Progress products and technologies
• Published many white papers on various product use cases. Mentored many team members to write
and publish white papers
• Very active in various industry events both as a speaker and as a participant to keep himself updated
with the current technology/product landscape
Principal QA Engineer, Team Lead, Evangelist Oct ’12 – Jan ’16
As a principal QA Engineer, Dr Ganesh worked on several cloud products at Progress. During this
tenure, he obtained a lot of experience on agile test methodologies, cloud test approaches, cross-product
integration testing and CoE level QA activities.
Products Worked
Progress Rollbase
Progress Rollbase is a rapid application development low code cloud platform which helps people build
enterprise productivity SaaS applications. You can choose to develop and deploy apps either on Cloud or
on-premise using this platform. Progress acquired this product in June 2013 and Dr Ganesh was part of
the initial seed team to deliver first release post-acquisition in July 2013. His involvement was crucial in
determining the strategy for QA for this product (which had no QA before) and release within a month.

3. Progress Data Direct Cloud
Progress Data Direct Cloud is a powerful hosted connectivity service that provides a single point of
universal connectivity for all your data whether in the cloud or on-premises behind a firewall. Connect
through a single standard interface - SQL (ODBC, JDBC) or REST (OData). Dr Ganesh was part of the QA
team from the beginning of this product development and key in developing test strategy and automation
approach for this debut cloud product in Progress.
Cloud Services Integration QA
Cloud Services (CS) acts as an underlying product to help run all e-commerce business for Rollbase, Data
Direct Cloud and other products. CS provides all the common functionalities required for these products
such as user management, notifications, checkout platform etc. Dr Ganesh acted as the Product Owner
and Scrum Master for CS Integration QA team and was instrumental in designing e-commerce integration
test approach for CS. These tests are designed for data flow between Progress cloud products and its back
office systems such as billing, invoice, marketing, legal, compliance and sales back-office systems.
Major achievements
• Derived the initial QA approach for test strategy and automation for Cloud-based products in Progress
• For end-to-end e-commerce integration testing for products with back-office systems, he devised an
approach and process to reduce the effort from 45 man days to 2 man days
• As a Product Owner (PO), he set the directions of Integration QA team and derived road map on a
regular basis
• Established a mechanism to offer cloud product test infrastructure setup for Progress products; helping
several teams across the globe for their development and test process in an efficient and faster way
• Competitive analysis done many times to assess cloud platform capabilities before Rollbase acquisition
and done again to identify its weakness later on
• Grooming next level architects by mentoring them to do competitive analysis on products and encourag-
ing them to write test strategies and quality profiles
• Led a team to automate a bunch of manual processes by customer on-boarding team which reduced their
effort to on-board an enterprise customer from a few days to 10 mins
• Key member in designing and evangelizing a model driven test automation framework which drastically
reduced automation development and maintenance time helping teams to catch up with automation
backlog quickly
• Worked on QA v2.0 initiative to take QA to next level. It included defining new processes and standards,
coding guidelines and skill improvement initiatives
• Designed a template for writing test strategies and inculcated the same as a practice across QA CoE to
write test strategy for important features and releases
• Ensuring QA leadership oversight on all the release tasks relating to Integration QA and the representative
voice from QA into the SoS (scrum of scrum) and also release risk assessments
• Rollbase pre-assessment before acquisition to assess the product quality and its strength and weakness.
It helped in deciding acquisition as well as in developing test strategy for the first release post acquisition
• Collaborating and helping Asia-Pacific sales team whenever they need help/assistance in Rollbase
solutions
• Collaborated with global field teams on doing many PoCs on cross-product integration use cases
• Interaction with several key prospects and customers on architecting various solutions for their use cases
• Weekly test strategy review meetings for enhanced collaboration among QA leads and managers. This
alone has helped significantly increase the level of thinking going into the test strategies and test specifi-
cations.
• Derived detailed test approach and automation plan for multi-product integration testing as well as for
e-commerce integration testing with back-office systems
• Introduced the concept of sanity automation for e-commerce end-to-end testing and it got implemented
to effectively handle short release cycles
• Started driving a special program to groom next level architects at Progress QA
• Fully managed and organized a successful internal hackathon at Progress, Hyderabad; Organized many
internal product road shows
• Mentoring Progress incubator startups in giving them technical guidance
• Mentoring QA members in solving their technical challenges - e.g. Analysis of performance test results

4. • Worked on several process improvements such as test strategy in sprint 0, quality profile in final sprint,
same sprint automation during release and go-live test approach for cloud products to quote a few
• Worked as an SME for some of the Rollbase courses from Knowledge Services team
• Writing test strategy, writing test plan and executing the same for various key product features
• Dr Ganesh was one of the 20 members company selected for an idea prototyping event in USA
• Mentoring M.Tech interns to do some interesting work for QA CoE
• Enthusiastic participation in UX assessments and sharing UX issues/concerns with UX team
• Actively involved in many functional and non-functional (performance,load,internationalization) test
approaches for cloud products
• Presented several talks on QA best practices, product use cases, technology talks etc. at customer/partner
conferences in USA and Europe
Major evangelism efforts
• Agile Testing; Principles and Best Practices, Talk at PUG Challenge Americas, Boston, USA, June 2015
• Software Quality Analysis with Cloud; Challenges and Approaches, Talk at PUG Challenge, Boston,
USA, June ’15
• Telerik Test Studio to Automate Web Applications, Workshop at PUG Challenge EMEA, Copenhagen,
Denmark, November 2015
• Presented a session on Cloud testing framework at IEEE QSIC, Nanjing, China in 2013
• Advanced Business Applications for the Cloud, Workshop at Progress Exchange, Orlando, USA, Oct ’14.
• Mastering Progress Rollbase - Inside Out, Talk at Progress Exchange, Orlando, USA, October 2014
• Game Theory for Computer Science, Invited talk, Tennessee State University, Nashville, USA, 2015
• Cloud Computing; Industry perspective, Invited talk Tennessee State University, Nashville, USA, 2015
• Presented a session on Agile testing at Decoding DevOps conference in Bengaluru 2015
• Presented a tutorial on Model-driven test framework in HSTC STep-IN conference in Hyderabad in 2014
• Published an article on the model driven test framework developed in IEEE ITPRO’14
• Actively mentor students at IIIT-Hyderabad to do various projects using different Progress products
• Webinar on Rollbase for Progress and Telerik customers in March 2015
• One day workshop on Progress Rollbase at ITsAP in December 2013
• HYSEA Rollbase mobile workshop in 2014
• Rollbase demo for various startup events in Hyderabad
• Organized a workshop on test engineering and delivered a talk in the same
• Written several blog posts on various technology landscape, QA practices and on Progress products
• Very active in twitter tweeting about Progress developments and technology domain. Got appreciated
from Marketing team also for the same multiple times
• Manning Progress booth at many industry events in Hyderabad
IIIT-Hyderabad Hyderabad, India
Visiting Faculty Aug ’13 – Present
Dr Ganesh is a visiting faculty here teaching many core and advanced subjects such as Computer
Networks, Advanced computer networks, Game theory for CS and Advanced topics in game theory.
He also mentor students to do projects on cutting edge technologies and platforms and guide PG
students for research projects.
NXP Semiconductors Ltd Bengaluru, India
Senior Software Engineer Oct ’06 – July ’07
NXP is a leader in high-performance, mixed-signal semiconductor electronics, with innovative products
and solutions and leadership positions in automotive etc At NXP, Dr Ganesh’s primary responsibility
were protocol stack development of UMA (WLAN-GSM dual stack) and protocol stack development of
RRM/RLC/MAC on Mobile for GSM/GPRS/EDGE using C language.
Sasken Communication Technologies Ltd Bengaluru, India
Software Engineer Sep ’04 – Sep ’06
Sasken offers research and development consultancy, wireless software products, software services
and network engineering services to semiconductor manufacturers, wireless handset developers,
network equipment and test and measurement companies, and service providers globally. Dr Ganesh
worked on End to End System Integration activities for GPRS/EDGE RAN at Sasken.

5. Education
National University of Singapore Kent Ridge, Singapore
Doctor of Philosophy Jan ’09 – July ’12
Supervisor: Prof Bharadwaj Veeravalli; PhD awarded in Dec 2012; PhD title: Broker-mediated Multiple-
Cloud Orchestration Mechanisms for Cloud Computing in Dept of ECE; Published several research papers in
reputed international journals, international conferences and book chapter during this time primarily
in the broad domain of cloud computing.
National University of Singapore Kent Ridge, Singapore
Master of Science Aug ’07 – Dec ’08
Completed M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering with specialization in Computer Engineering. Did a project
under the guidance of Dr Kong Peng-Yong ay I2R (Institute of Infocomm Research, Singapore) in the
area of wireless networks.
Mahatma Gandhi University College of Engineering Thodupuzha, Kerala, India
Bachelor of Technology Nov ’00 – Aug ’04
Completed B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering with University FIRST rank. Final year project
was done as DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organization), Bengaluru, India in 2003
Skills, Activities and Awards
Technical expertise:
• Programming Skills: C, C++, JavaScript, TypeScript
• Domain Skills: Cloud, IoT, Mobile
• Platform Skills: Low-code platforms, AWS, Docker
• Test tool Skills: Sahi, TTS, Selenium
• Tools: Zabbix, IBM RTC, IBM CQ, Team Pulse, Github
Natural languages: Malayalam (mother tongue), English (full professional proficiency), Tamil and Hindi (limited
working proficiency).
Professional Activities: Visiting Faculty at IIIT-Hyderabad; Active in blogging and writing technical whitepa-
pers about QA and Cloud; Talking and participating in various technical events; Attended a certified
program on Management 3.0; Member of IEEE and IEEE Computer Society; Reviewer of many internation-
als journals/Conferences; Board of studies member at JNTU-H for curriculum design for UG students;
Attended several executive leadership workshops at Progress
Corporate Activities involved: Actively involved in corporate social responsibility activities at Progress, in
the editorial team for monthly newsletter and organizing committee member for organizing employee
entertainment activities such as quiz competitions and outings
Honors and Awards:
• Outstanding Contributor Award for Integration QA lead activities, Progress software, 2014
• Team Achievement Award for e-commerce integration testing, Progress Software, 2015
• Spot Recognition for robustness activities in Rollbase QA, Progress Software, 2016
• University Topper (First Rank) for the B-Tech degree examination in 2004
• National University of Singapore, Postgraduate Research Scholarship, 2009-2012
• Consistently excellent feedback for the teaching duties in NUS ( 4.4/5) and in IIIT-H ( 4.5/5)
• Spot recognition for identifying the root cause and fixing a critical customer bug in a record time at NXP
Semiconductors Ltd, 2007
• Q star award for the project of the quarter Q March 2005 in Sasken Communications
Interests
Non-exhaustive and in alphabetical order: Kathakali (A traditional Indian art. Dr Ganesh is a professional
dancer; he has composed a story in Kathakali and he spends considerable amount of his personal time
to uplift this traditional art by organizing Kathakali performances, workshops and demonstrations and
performance by himself), Photography, Quiz Master, Travel, Teaching and Vegetarian cooking.