Maduka Dona Colombage

Maduka Dona Colombage, a dynamic, hard-working and enthusiastic professional with twelve plus years of industry experience in Information Technology. Working with Agile/Scrum practice in last 6 plus years with strong foundation with Software Quality Assurance and Project Management. Proven leadership abilities in working as a team, handling multiple project teams, really motivated and always ready to learn new things. Worked on a wide range of projects and applications in the Healthcare, Financial and Insurance domains. She has right enthusiasm to ensure possess a zest for the Scrum culture; smiles easily and has a positive, eager, and responsive attitude. This leads her to make trustworthy relationship all clients past five plus years at different client sites in USA. She approach situations maturely and demonstrate a great deal of common sense. This leads to take quick decisions in any carrier. Maduka started her Carrier with one of the leading global software development organization, Virtusa/ VirtusaPolaris Cooperation as a Quality Assurance engineer 2004 in Sri Lanka. She started Agile/ scrum practice as a team member in 2010, she was the quality assurance team lead in scrum team. She has trained on Agile/Scrum process as tester. Then she enhanced her horizon and move to team management and project management segment. She worked with dozens of projects executed in Agile/Scrum paradigm, initially as a team member then moves towards ScrumMaster role. She started to play ScrumMaster role in one of the Healthcare organization project in 2010. Then she moved to USA in 2011 and continues to work with same client for couple of years as a ScrumMaster. Maduka Dona Colombage got her scrum master certification in May 2016 and moved to one of the client project and established Agile/Scrum practice for this new client. As a ScrumMaster she is conducting Planning sessions, Daily scrums, and team Retrospectives for each sprint. And she is coordinating sprint Demos. She takes responsibilities beyond her role and conducting training sessions for team on scrum process. Hence the client is not mature in scrum, she has to demonstrate scrum values to client and get their buying on the new process. That helps to penetrate requirement of scrum practice in most of the IT projects in the organization. The percentage of companies embracing the Agile/Scrum movement have surpassed those using waterfall and the percentage continues to increase. This trend is focusing companies and organization to adopt management methods and tools to accelerate time to market more easily managing changing priorities, increase customer satisfaction and reduce product expenses. As a scrum master Maduka establishes scum ceremonies Spring Planning, Daily scrum, Sprint Demo and Sprint Retrospectives. Enhance ability to get end user feedback through client demos and continues improvement through retrospectives. Daily progress was tracked and team members’ impediments were address through daily scrum. Sprint planning enables team to pick user stories for the current sprint while product manager providing priorities on user stories/ items. User stories/ items were sized with Fibonacci series, planning poker was used as the mechanism to come up these numbers. Her biggest challenging was on expectation management, especially when same backlog shared with multiple product owners. She was able to introduce proper mechanism to prioritize product backlog based on business value and the story/item size, proper expectations were set up with product owners upfront. Release management process redefined to cater with the sprint cycles. Most of projects had diversified team located in multiple locations such as US, India and Sri Lanka; hence had to use scrum tools to manage teams. Maduka was exposed to several scrum management tools such as Jira, RTC and Rally. Maduka was involved in a critical exercise of selecting the best tool for the one her client project. She has conducted a feasibility study on industry scrum tools to select the best tool suite for the client project based on criteria. In this exercise she had to involve with multiple scrum tool vendors and provide feedback on their products and how products can be improve to cater all Scrum requirements. Maduka involve with project monitoring and control process and introduced couple of quality metrics to ensure continues improvement. Iteration(Sprint) burndown chart, Burnup Chart, Release velocity charts were produced and maintain dashboard to present these metrics. Apart from this several key defect metrics maintained to track on quality of the development. Being ScrumMaster she was able to maintain positive attitudes and zeal even when the going is tough. She was able to effectively manage her team under heavy work load with lot of pressure from client parties in multiple client engagements. Apart from Scrum practice Maduka is having very good background on Quality Assurance, Test automation, BPM-Pega practice and project management. Maduka was graduated as Electrical Engineer from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka in 2005 and she has completed her bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology. She has very good track record as a trainer and a lectures; she was a visiting lecture while she was back in Sri Lanka. Currently she is reading for PMP. She likes to spend her leisure time with nature and hiking. Having focused on project execution and work experience on gaining as much knowledge of Scrum, she has become more and more convinced that she has the right combination of ambition, aptitude and determination to succeed as Scrum professional. Enhancing this knowledge and experience through working experience is the next essential step to making this ultimate goal a reality.