Thirty year veteran of Engineering and Quality leadership, shipping 340+ Consumer and Enterprise products, transforming teams, setting a high bar for product delivery excellence, launch, and fit-and-finish. Responsible for high visibility product delivery and demos to C-Suite, investors, media outlets, partners, and analysts. Leadership for global teams of up to 220 people across a wide variety of Consumer and Enterprise product categories including: mobile, desktop, web, broadcast and streaming video, security, IoT, automotive, and aerospace. A results-oriented individual with excellent leadership, managerial, and communication skills.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/allisonkmcfarland/
Awards and Accolades
- 2023 – Advisor to CEOs / Startups
- 2023 – STEM Inclusion Task Force and STEM Mentoring – The Tech Interactive Museum
- 2017 – 2021 – Amazon FireTV Star award winner, multiple time recipient
- 2017 – 2021 – Amazon FireTV CES and NAB awards
- 2011 – 2017 – Telestream NAB awards
- 2017 – First Implementation of Dolby Atmos into Consumer Products
- 2015 – First Implementation of YouTube 360
- 2015 – First Implementation of Facebook Live
- 2015 – Emmy – Technology and Engineering Emmy – Non-live broadband Captioning
- 2014 – Team Winner – Testathon – San Francisco, CA – Selected Individually as one of the top 50 QA in Silicon Valley, Team won second round of Testathon which is a hackathon for Software QA
- 2008 – Symantec Network Access Control – SNAC – Best of Tests Winner – Network World Magazine
- STEM Keynote Speaker
- American Youth Foundation / International Leadership Conference Community Director
Testathon team winner 2014 – Hackathon for Testers
Over 700+ people applied to participate in the Testathon and I was selected as one of the top 50 testers of the Silicon Valley / San Francisco Bay Area. Honored just to have been chosen to compete in the competition. Competed and my team won the second session of the Hackathon / Testathon, video below, I am in the pink shirt. Ha.
EXPERIENCE
Responsible for high visibility product delivery and demos to C-Suite, investors, media outlets, partners, and analysts. Leadership for global teams of up to 220 people across a wide variety of Consumer and Enterprise product categories including: mobile, desktop, web, broadcast and streaming video, security, IoT, automotive, and aerospace. Director of Quality Assurance Engineering, Release Management, Program / Project Management.
ePhysician
Software Quality Assurance Engineer
- Contributed as a SQA Engineer in a startup company, testing handheld mobile clients and applications used by doctors for prescription and lab ordering
- Trained doctors at Stanford on the prescription ordering applications, performed product installation on site in physician offices, patent research, learned physician workflow for writing prescriptions incorporated this into our application, captured Beta feedback
- Recruited, interviewed and hired candidates to build quality department
RocketCash
(acquired by Coca-Cola)
Manager Quality Assurance Engineering
- Founded and managed the quality assurance department for an eCommerce website that allowed kids to purchase online with their RocketCash
- Managed the QA team for the e-Commerce website, all updates and products, creation of test plans / matrices for web and product testing, database stored procedure testing, employee hiring, review, appraisal, and incentive / bonus management
- Developed guidelines, procedures and documentation for Quality Assurance and Engineering departments, managed the bug database, tracking and documentation for end users, and developed and maintained the company Intranet
Online shopping for kids with allowance options with 200+ merchants. eCommerce QA Manager software engineering, proxying the 200+ merchants and auto field population of checkout forms so kids didn’t have to fill out the checkout process. Intellectual Property was acquired by Coca-Cola and is now what is known as My Coke Rewards with codes on the bottle caps for redemption.
Handspring, Inc. / Palm, Inc.
Lead Software & Hardware QA Engineer
Core Design Team for the Treo 180/180g, Treo 600, Treo 650
- Led Software Quality Assurance Engineer / Core Design team with Jeff Hawkins (PalmPilot Inventor) for many handheld mobile devices, mobile software (PalmOS and WebOS), ROM, Windows, and Mac software releases for all devices
- Created test plans for all projects led & for functional areas led, wrote test cases for all projects worked on, performed test runs for all test cycles
- Performed research and wrote up documentation for departmental guidelines for testing, bug writing & ‘how to’ information, Contributed to software feature design reviews, provided hardware bugs to the hardware team, led bug scrubs
- Executive and Beta program support for all devices that were in development
Handspring Photo Album
Handspring Visor Deluxe
Handspring Visor Platinum
Handspring Visor Prism
Handspring Visor Edge
Handspring Neo
Handspring Pro
Handspring Visor Phone 2001
Handspring Treo 90
Handspring Treo 180 and 180g – Core Design Team and Lead for first smartphone 2002
Handspring Treo 270
Handspring Treo 300
Palm Tungsten W
Audi A8 Bluetooth with Treo integration
Handspring Treo 600 – Core Design Team
Palm Treo 650 – Core Design Team
Palm Treo 680
Palm Treo 700
Palm Treo 750
Palm Pre
Symantec Corporation
Manager, Consumer Response Team Quality Engineering Manager, Quality Assurance Enterprise Engineering
Consumer Response Team (CRT)
- Created and built Consumer Response Team for the full Consumer Product Line (Norton AntiVirus family of products)
- Created and ran Tiger team reporting to the CEO to address resolve all top 10 issues company wide to address Press related issues immediately in 3 days or less, worked closely with development to come up with best solution for customers, worked closely with technical support to understand customer issues and resolve these in a timely manner
- Responsible for 2006 Core consumer product releases, responsible for Consumer tool test cycles & release schedules
- Led rigorous test planning and project management for all projects: established ship dates targets and drove execution to ensure on-time shipping, healthy bug metrics, and adherence to company guidelines for metrics, performance, and KPIs Responsible for job descriptions, interviewing, hiring, and performance management
Symantec Network Access Control Team (SNAC part of SEP)
- Managed Software QA Engineering for Symantec Network Access Control part of Symantec Endpoint Protection (Windows, Mac, Linux) and all groups associated with this in the US and China including new development, customer response, automation, content delivery team (Host Integrity, AVDefs, IPS)
- Achieved substantial automation for all teams under my domain, 40% automation for SNAC in one year, with over 1400 test cases automated and 30% automation achieved, managing up to 6 products and 30 employees at one time
- Achieved SNAC QA – Symantec Network Access Control being named “2007 Best End-to-End NAC Solution” and “2008 Best of the Tests Winner” by Network World Magazine, and Common Criteria EAL2+ Certification
- Managed the Customer Response Teams for products managed, managed many core and maintenance releases simultaneously
Symantec SNAC 6100
While I managed SNAC QA – Symantec Network Access Control was named “2007 Best End-to-End NAC Solution” by Network World Magazine
While I managed SNAC QA – Symantec Network Access Control was named “2008 Best of the Tests Winner” by Network World Magazine
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise – HPE
Manager, Quality Manager, PMO
- Performed milestone / gate review management for all software releases for Department of Justice client account
- Established standards and processes for the Project Management Organization (PMO) that later were adopted company-wide
- Performed quality audits of Teams, Releases, Processes, and Metrics
- Presented results to executive leadership and recommended/implemented process improvement across project teams
- Obtained security clearance for project for the Department of Justice, combining all of the 42 prison legacy software systems in California into one new combined software system
Telestream, LLC
Manager Quality Assurance Engineering
Software Engineering QA Manager for all Software, Hardware, Consumer and Enterprise products. Video transcoding software for Broadcast television as well as live streaming and live capture solutions.
- Led QA activities for Consumer and Enterprise product software and hardware, managing a team of up to 35 direct reports in multiple locations in the US in an Agile/Scrum development environment
- Managed all high profile launches and releases for all operating systems, mobile, desktop, and web, for all major broadcast networks, NBC/Olympics, HBO, NASCAR, NFL, The Colbert Show, Netflix (IMF), including the first Facebook Live implementation and first YouTube360 implementation.
- Developed test plans, test cases, test readiness criteria, release checklist criteria, training new employees on QA process, Automation, Jira Administration, Agile Methodology implementation, STIGS compliance / documentation, Hardware QA process definitionAchieved automation implementation for user interface, licensing, build acceptance, build verification, functional and regression tests and automated back end video comparison analysis for video transcoder
- Involved in NAB, SMPTE meetings/standards, and our Engineering team won an Emmy for Closed Captioning standardization for broadcast engineering
CaptionMaker & MacCaption – Team winner of 2015 Technical & Engineering Emmy
Replay (Nascar) Software that the Nascar race officials use to officiate the races.
Amazon Lab126
Quality Assurance Manager III
Amazon Fire TV Edition Televisions 2017-2021
- Established and managed the End-to-End FireTV Edition Quality Assurance Engineering teams in the US (Bay Area and Seattle), China, India responsible for all consumer product software and hardware
- Formalized testing of FireTV (FireOS/Android), broadcast and streaming video and audio, Bluetooth/BLE, Alexa ecosystem integration, IoT, 10,000+ applications, and ensured performance and KPI requirements were met for a user base of more than 50 million people streaming billions of hours of content every month
- Managed initial FireTV Television launch and delivered consumer product televisions for North America, UK, Europe and India
- Led all engineering release checkpoint activities for C-Suite review to ensure adherence to shipment criteria, risk mitigations, and performance KPIs
- Acted as primary FireTV liaison to BestBuy which entailed management of the partner and ODM relationships from kick off, through requirements gathering, roadmap planning, factory ship process, first article inspection, milestone management for software and hardware as well as final sign off, and travel to factories to give the final OK to Ship for production line start
- Managed factory processes in Beijing, Kunsan, Taipei, Shanghai and Xiamen
- Managed disposition of and responses to Customer Reviews from Amazon.com and BestBuy.com (issue mitigation, bug isolation, general complaints) to ensure customer satisfaction and high star ratings
- Responsible for up to 25 product delivery launches per year, each with 7 SKUs and requiring more than 5 factory software and hardware releases
- Performed hands-on testing for every device that my group shipped
- Delivered products every year from 2017 through 2021 which obtained a 4.7 – 5 star rating, and were the top rated televisions for all of Amazon Fire TVs as well as for all televisions at amazon.com
- Contributed as a writer to Amazon Medium publications
Amazon Fire TV Edition for USA
Amazon Fire TV Edition for Canada
Amazon Fire TV with Dolby Vision
Amazon Fire TV for UK
Amazon Fire TV for India
#womenintech #siliconvalley #stem #softwareengineering
Amazon Fire TV Edition 2020 Releases for North America, UK, Europe
Toshiba and Insignia All SKUs from 19″-70″
Achieving a 4.6 and a 4.7 out of 5 rating
#amazon #qualityassurance #qa #softwareengineering #hardwareengineering
Amazon Fire TV Edition 2021 Releases for North America
Toshiba and Insignia All SKUs from 19″-70″
Director of Quality Assurance and Release Management
- Directed all release activities for software and firmware across a system comprising mobile apps (iOS and Android), web applications for carriers and consumers, and OBD-II modules in cars
- Institutionalized formal Release Management process that included establishment of a Release Control Board, enumeration of release criteria, and formal sign-off procedures
- Managed Quality Assurance Engineering teams in the US, Canada, and India (performance management, goal setting, recruiting, and hiring)Released software (mobile and web) and hardware (OBD-II and firmware) for the following products: Motion for Audi Connect, T-Mobile SyncUP Drive, Force, Motion, Connected Car Platform, Mojio Engage Modules, and many releases for carriers worldwide
- Created and standardized test plans for software and hardware releases; formalized bug logging / test plan cadence ensuring a high quality bar was met
- Institutionalized the rigorous use of Jira and Confluence for issue tracking, workflows, and metrics/analytics dashboards Establish standards for bug logging, database cleanup, data archiving
- Worked with team members to obtain ISO 27001 certification and 99.999% uptime for GA and development releases
Performed hands-on testing and bug logging in addition to Director level responsibilities
E-SPACE
Director of Test and Integration – Flight Software
- Directed all flight software verification and validation activities for flight software and its integration with mission ops, GNC (guidance, navigation, and control), and ground system software
- Directed release and configuration management for flight softwareFormalized flight software test plans, created test cases, and generated requirements traceability artifacts
- Created, tracked, and enforced entry/exit criteria for release milestones in accordance with the NASA model
- Created risk identification and mitigation process
- Established Flight Software Lab (for integration testing) and Mission Ops Lab (for mission ops, GNC, and Mission Control Center for satellite launches)
- Institutionalized the rigorous use of Jira and Confluence for issue tracking, workflows, and metrics/analytics dashboards
- Bootstrapped early setup and staffing of the Los Gatos office location – formalized job descriptions, recruited, interviewed, hired, acted as facilities manager, and local IT support
Advisor to Startups
Providing guidance to early startups, assisting them in early development and process and procedures to ensure success and obtain funding.
Allison McFarland 