Summary of Experience: Chalakanth Reddy
Summary of Experience: Chalakanth Reddy
Summary of Experience: Chalakanth Reddy
Summary of Experience
This is a prcis of the summary I have placed in LinkedIn, and at my blog i. Since 2001, I have played lead and architect roles in various J2EE initiatives. Earlier experience, from 1994 on, includes development in other environments (C, C++, Visual Basic), after sales customer service, quality assurance, and technical editing. The breadth, and longevity of my experience has made me a solid generalist, bolstered by good analytical, and communication skills. My responsibilities as a System Architect have included research and choice of technologies; large-grained and detailed design; training, and mentoring programming, business analysis, and QA resources; coding high risk, and complex work; agile project planning, and delivery; empowering management and business stakeholders with education about technology choices, design decisions, and implementation issues. The bulk of the work has been in P & C insurance, with a couple of years in the real estate appraisals industry. I have done considerable business analysis work, informed by knowledge gained during my tenures in quality assurance, technical editing, and customer service learn to separate pure business requirements, the essence of the business, from all considerations of the technical solution. This work has also sensitized me to the value of user experience, and usability. As suggested in these blog postsii, I believe that user experience in the enterpriseiii is more than just the graphical user interface that a business useriv sees. I believe in the need for, and the possibility of, quality in software engineeringv, while remaining aware of the many practical, and legitimate obstacles to achieving that goal. I am familiar with common object-oriented design patterns, and best practices, and am able to write simple, and clear code. Finally, I am cognizant of some of the challenges and strengths of out-sourced development vi, having lived in India, been an offshore resource myself, and having worked in the U.S. with offshore resources.
Technologies
Presentation Infrastructure Service Layer Data access layer Text-based search Web Services Developer testing Workflow management Application Server Software Configuration Management Business Analysis, Specification HTML, CSS, Javascript, DWR, JSF, JSP, WebMacro, WebWork Spring Core, Spring Security, Apache Commons, Google Guava, Log4j, EJB session beans, JMS, JBoss MQ. Java, JBoss Rules (Drools) Hibernate, Oracle, SQL Server, Container Managed Transactions, JTA transactions, JDBC transactions Apache Solr, Lucene JAX-WS, Apache CXF, Apache Axis; JAX-RS, Jersey, RESTEasy Junit, Junit Perf, Cactus, JMock, Mockito, Groovy JBPM, Workflow Management Reference Model JBoss 3x, JBoss AS 4.x, JBoss AS 7 ANT, Maven, Subversion, CA-Harvest, Git, Groovy (Some project automation) UML (Sparx Enterprise Architect), Wireframes (Balsamiq)
1 of 12
Chalakanth Reddy 213 Pennsylvania Ave Emsworth, PA 15202 412 527 6900
Employment history
October 2006 to April 2013
Consulted as lead engineer at Farmers Alliance Insurance Co., helping them in their effort to move away from a mainframe-based legacy system to a J2EE system. Worked on pre-sales, and development of Jarus mobile solutions for P & C insurance.
Introduced agile project planning techniques, and was lead engineer on new development, and maintenance work related to NASCOs in-house J2EE information system.
Consulted as Senior Software Engineer on Nationwide Appraisal Services development of an in-house J2EE information system. Consulted as business analyst, and project-cordinator at Bankers Life, Inc. Worked on several J2EE projects related to SEECs own products.
QA lead for all of SEECs product lines. Later was team lead of the UI development effort for SEEC AXCESS, a J2EE web portal that SEEC was developing for insurance agents. Also involved in other miscellaneous Java development.
Consulted as software engineer at Whitfield Software Services, doing C, C++ development on their projects belonging to Microsoft, and DEC. I was part of the after sales customer service team at SEEC for a year. In addition I did miscellaneous development work at SEEC, notable of which was lot of scripting with Visual Basic for Access, and Mercurys automated test scripting language.
Education
B.A., Computer Science, State University of New York, Potsdam, NY. M.S., Computer Science, West Chester University, West Chester, PA (incomplete, pending thesis submission)
2 of 12
Chalakanth Reddy 213 Pennsylvania Ave Emsworth, PA 15202 412 527 6900
Primarily worked with Jarus mobile solutions for P & C companies. Did maintenance on the Java implementation of Jarus REST API for P & C. The API was implemented with JBoss implementation of JAX-RS, called RESTEasy. Tested the API with the Client API in Jersey, the reference implementation of JAX-RS. Deployment was on JBoss 7. Did pre-sales work with Jarus business development team. Created presentations on the technical aspects of Jarus mobile solutions. Visited prospective customers, made presentations, and helped them formulate customizations that were appropriate to their environment.
3 of 12
Chalakanth Reddy 213 Pennsylvania Ave Emsworth, PA 15202 412 527 6900
Consultant at Farmers Alliance Insurance Co. helping them with their long-standing effort to move off the mainframe to a J2EE centric, web-based platform. Since, April 2009, all of my work was part of building a new Policy Administration system, called Compass. Generally, I played a lead engineer role, which included these responsibilities. Large grained architectural decisions choosing tools, and technologies, determining large-grained system structure. Technical analysis, fine-grained design, and construction on critical, and infrastructure aspects of the applications. Business analysis on several projects Mentoring, and overseeing engineering team, including business analysts, and testers, both on-shore, and offshore. Empower the clients IT team with education about technologies, design decisions, implementation considerations, and transparent, pragmatic, and flexible (agile) project planning, and tracking.
Business Functions
In particular, my team and I largely developed, and supported these slices of functionality. A central, contact (all persons, and organizations that interacted with the insurance company) management system Web based endorsement of Personal Auto policies Integration of policies with billing workflows A system to create and manage business tasks, built on top of JBPM. A text-based search of contacts, and policies, built with Lucene, and Apache Solr. Application security roles, and permissions, built on top of Spring Security Migrate all legacy documents from the mainframe ( OnDemand), to server based system (Acrosoft)
Designed the structure of the code base for Compass - layered the code to achieve separation of concerns. Later, essentially improved the structure, by identifying layers that could be consolidated.
Heavily involved in Software Configuration Management. o Created and maintained the initial build system ANT, with Maven 2 for dependency management. 4 of 12
Chalakanth Reddy 213 Pennsylvania Ave Emsworth, PA 15202 412 527 6900
o o o
Later, I helped move Compass to an all Maven 2 build system. Helped introduce Subversion into the work. Did some project automation work with ANT, and Groovy checkout, check-in, tagging, build, and release to Maven repository. This involved Subversion, and CA Harvest, the other source control system in our environment.
Responsible for choosing several of the tools we used. o JBPM for workflow management o Lucene, and Apache Solr, for text-based search o ANT, Maven, and Subversion for SCM (software configuration management) Primary developer on risky, application-wide, re-factorings, cleanup, and code reduction.
Soup to Nuts
On several development tasks, I was the sole resource. The work included everything. Business Analysis Spoke to end-users and nailed down pure business requirements, taking care not to bleed into technical solutions. A lot of the communication was in UML (activity diagrams, and state diagrams mostly), created with Enterprise Architect. Also included a fair amount of writing, and presentations, in WORD, and Powerpoint. Technical analysis, and solution specification, including UI design Conversations regarding UI design used UML state diagrams, wireframes created with Balsamiq, and HTML mockups. Construction, including developer testing Developer testing was primarily on backend code, and used Junit, and JunitPerf. Some Groovy tests too. Documentation, and presentations, for testers and business folks. A lot of WORD, and Powerpoint.
5 of 12
Chalakanth Reddy 213 Pennsylvania Ave Emsworth, PA 15202 412 527 6900
Support
Helped with Help Desk tickets and such. However, other, dedicated resources did the heavy lifting in this regard.
Project Management
We were Agile in this respect release small vertical slices of functionality, frequently. Depending on the project, our iterations were between 2 to 6 weeks, with most of them being about 4. Project estimation, and tracking happened in MS Project. Issue tracking, and task incubation happened in Bugzilla.
Broadly, all of the work belonged to the J2EE world, running on JBoss AS. Specifically, I used the tools given below for various purposes, and to various degrees of depth. Category Presentation client side Presentation - server side Infrastructure Application Security Service Layer Data access layer Text-based search Logging Web Services Developer testing Productivity frameworks Workflow management Application Server Build Management / Project Automation Business Analysis, and Solution Specification Tools HTML, CSS, Javascript, DWR for Ajax JSF, JSP Spring Core Spring Security Java, JBoss Rules (Drools) Hibernate, Oracle, JDBC Transactions Apache Solr, Lucene Apache Commons Logging, Log4j Apache CXF Junit, Junit Perf, Groovy Apache Commons, Google Guava JBPM JBoss AS 4.x, JBoss AS 7 ANT, Maven, Groovy UML (Sparx Enterprise Architect), Wireframes (Balsamiq)
6 of 12
Chalakanth Reddy 213 Pennsylvania Ave Emsworth, PA 15202 412 527 6900
Generally played a leadership role that included mentoring, designing, and coding. I was primary resource on several complex and high-risk tasks. Introduced Agile practices in planning, estimation, and execution. This included user stories, story points, and iterations. Created coding and de si gn st a n da rd s. I n tr odu ced use of S un s J 2E E pa tt e rn s t he Blu e P rin t doc ume n ts. Unit testing with Junit, Jmock, and Cactus. Primary resource for maintaining the build system. This was initially all ANT, and we later moved to Maven. Served as primary resource for JBoss on various issues. Manage clustering, with session replication; setup high availability JNDI, JMS, and EJB; Manage the JCA layer, and JTA transactions. Primary resource for adding distributed transactions (controlled database and JMS activity) to the inhouse J2EE system. Tools to manage included the JBoss Transaction Manager, Apache Torque O/R mapping layer, Data Direct JDBC driver for SQL Server, and SQL Server. o Created a Jboss patch to make available DataDirects database side timeout to Jboss.
Rewrote document generation, and distribution sub-system. Participated in day to day production support
7 of 12
Chalakanth Reddy 213 Pennsylvania Ave Emsworth, PA 15202 412 527 6900
Consulted with Nationwide Appraisal Services Co, as a Senior Software Engineer. In July 2005, I switched over to being an employee of Nationwide, in a similar role, but with added authority. The work description for my tenure as a System Architect at Nationwide, available above, applies here.
Consulted at Bankers Life, working on their Customer Service Portal a web application wrapper around disparate legacy systems. Developed an automated build and deploy process. Primary liaison between client's users and SEEC developers. Managed users' expectations to match what SEEC can deliver. Performed systems analysis and develop user and detailed specifications of the Customer Service Portal Participated in design of system architecture, and user interface. Did acceptance testing of the delivered system
8 of 12
Chalakanth Reddy 213 Pennsylvania Ave Emsworth, PA 15202 412 527 6900
Worked on miscellaneous development tasks. Migrated SEECs Customer Service data from Onyx to SalesForce. Designed and coded the XMLRPC clients that pushed the data over. Enhance Asera's Order Management application to accept faxed purchase orders. Designed and coded the translator that converts data in the electronic fax into Asera's XML framework. Designed and coded a prototype of a rapid application generator that generated Asera Business Objects from DB2 data beans which are stored in SEEC's Component Builder Develop a framework for the generation of User Interface storyboards from SEEC's proprietary specification of a form. We took SEECs tags and produced documents in HTML, XML, JSP, etc.
Java, JINI, JSP, log4j, Apache Jakarta regular expression library XML-RPC, SalesForce XML-RPC interface. IBM DB2, IBM Websphere Asera E-Business Server, Excel, SEECs Component Builder
I was SEECs on-site business analyst at Bankers Life. I worked on their effort to build a web interface around several disparate, host-based, legacy Customer Service applications, in order to reduce training costs for Level 1 Customer Service representatives. I elicited, and documented business requirements, and the solution specification. I was the primary liaison between client and developers, and managed clients expectations to match what SEEC could deliver. Helped acceptance test the delivered application.
9 of 12
Chalakanth Reddy 213 Pennsylvania Ave Emsworth, PA 15202 412 527 6900
Served as a team lead on several development initiatives. Prototyped the use of SEECs Integration Components with various workflow technologies. o Evaluated the Workflow Management Coalition's Workflow Reference Model. o Implemented a homegrown workflow system using JSP, Servlets, XML, and XSLT. o Prototyped Asera's E-Business Operating System for workflow management. Led UI development on SEEC AXCESS, a P & C Insurance Agency portal o Reviewed specifications, and did preliminary detailed design. o Trained and led UI team - UI was in Java, JSP, HTML, JavaScript and some XSLT. o Was the build manager o Trained SEECs Business Analysts on the rule engine, OPS/J.
I was the testing lead for all of SEECs product line. Devise a testing process and incorporate this into SEEC's development life cycle. Lead the testing group. The duties included interviewing and hiring testers; training testers; planning and creating testing work, both manual and automated, and managing their execution. Participate in the reviews of specifications of the various development projects. Take responsibility for the technical accuracy of the documentation. This involved technical writing and technical editing.
Mercury Interactive's Winrunner, TestDirector, and Test Scripting Language COBOL, SEEC Products- Mosaic Studio, Application Designer, Component Builder, Component Builder- Host
10 of 12
Chalakanth Reddy 213 Pennsylvania Ave Emsworth, PA 15202 412 527 6900
This tenure included a years worth of after sales customer service, and the rest as a Software Engineer, at SEEC, and as a consultant with Whitfield Software Services, working on various problems, and with various technologies. Created text processing tools, reporting tools, and automated test suites with a variety of scripting languages. o Visual Basic for Access, o WinEdit o Mercurys Test Scripting Language Wrote C++ test suites for Microsofts ODBC specification Several porting, and maintenance efforts involving DECs software and hardware o Ported DECs SQL Engine from BLISS to C o Maintenance on DECs SQL Engine, and RDB o Ported an insurance package from VAX to Alpha hardware Reverse engineered and documented legacy COBOL applications using OMT (Object Modeling Technique)
11 of 12