Ayesha’s Quality Assurance (QA) journey started as an Associate QA Engineer at Virtusa. She joined Virtusa while completing her bachelor’s degree at Curtin University. She didn’t stop there; she continued her further studies with SLIIT while working at Virtusa as a fresher. Ayesha always thrives for the best and successfully completed her second Bachelor’s Degree with a second upper class. During her final year, she worked on building a framework with her team, “Common QA framework for Saving business flow in the banking system” and published it at SLIIT Research Symposium in 2008.
Ayesha is a natural leader who showcases her leadership skills in almost everything she is engaged with. Ayesha brings a lot of skills to her professional life by being a basketball player at school. She has played basketball for many years at school, Kurunegala district, Northwestern province, and the national youth pool. Her captaincy has helped those teams to win many championships. She has continued to play basketball at SLIIT and she was the secretary of the first sports council at SLIIT. Sports has helped her to strengthen her personality as a leader and excel in her professional career.
At Virtusa, she got the opportunity to work as an automation tester on her first project. She is a quick learner and adapted well to new tools. This was a big milestone of her automation journey as it helps her to continue to learn many automation tools like QTP, WATIR, Robot framework and Selenium, etc, and move on to various projects within Virtusa. Ayesha is a tech-savvy individual who has self-studied WATIR tool & Ruby language and built an automation framework for her project. Later, she became the official trainer for WATIR tool in Virtusa. Further, she has submitted white papers on the WATIR tool in QA days. Her automation excellence helps her to be part of the “CMB Test Automation Specialized Group” that works on automation initiatives in Virtusa. She has worked in Banking, Telecommunication, Content Management and Network threat analysis domains. She was a top performer at Virtusa and within a time span of 8 years she excelled in to Associate QA Manager role. This includes 5 promotions; QA Engineer, Senior QA Engineer, Consultant and Senior Consultant and Associate QA Manager. She became the Overall lead for a 30+ testers pool that worked across 6 projects as a “Center of Excellence” across Banking and Financial Services (BFS) account.
She is a well-known individual within Virtusa as an interviewer and also as a trainer for future QA engineers. She is an all-rounder who stepped into various activities within Virtusa. Another example of her engagement is to achieve CMMi level 5 in 2012. Ayesha has won many awards within Virtusa for her excellent service to the QA community, “Training Excellence Award”, “Service Excellence Award”, “Quality Award” and “Participation Award for CMMi Level 5 Achievement”.
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As a Virtusan, she got the opportunity to be a visiting lecturer for Quality assurance (QA) subject at 2 leading universities, the National Institute of Business Management (NIBM - Sri Lanka) and the University of Colombo. While Ayesha is excelling in her career, she is also focused on getting her postgraduate qualification “MBA in IT” at the University of Moratuwa. She started her Masters when she reached her leadership level so that she could practice her learnings within the professional environment. This is a competitive academic qualification and Ayesha completed her master's degree within 2 years as class rank one (batch top). She not only excels at her career but also at academics. Her master's research was on “CMMi adoption of Sri Lankan software development companies”; she reached out to various companies to carry out the analysis and got the opportunity to engage with a wider audience in the Sri Lankan IT industry. This opened up many doors for her and she got invited to do a visiting lecture at the University of Moratuwa for postgraduate students.
Ayesha’s family moved to New Zealand in 2016; she left great memories with her Sri Lankan IT professionals who are still in contact with her. She was a great leader/ mentor/ coach/ trainer/ teacher for many Virtusans and university students.
In a new country, she again started her career from scratch as an Automation analyst at Datacom. Settling down in a different country with a young family is always challenging. Ayesha took the first few years to adapt to the country, IT industry, and ways of working. Her background of working with US and UK projects helped her to understand the team dynamics, technologies and culture. She has worked onsite with a few clients and built a good rapport with IT professionals. Later, she moved to ANZ bank as a Senior Test Engineer with a new challenge of learning Data warehouse testing. It was the first time she stepped into ETL testing and she accepted the challenge. She always takes these opportunities to expand her knowledge and add more skills to her technology spectrum. She learned cloud technologies and integrated data warehouse solutions with the latest technologies like AWS. She was a quick learner and adapted quickly to new project contexts. Once again, she showcased her leadership skills and was promoted to Test lead role within two years. She continues to excel in her career by moving to her next role as Chapter Lead at ASB Bank. She has been into the banking domain for more than twelve years (this includes 8+ years of PEGA testing). Being an Associate QA manager before helps her to settle down quickly within the Chapter lead role. Currently, she is managing more than 20 testers within engineering practice. Ayesha enjoys her new role as it involves working on new initiatives, learning opportunities for new domains & technologies, and people management with diversified team members & culture. She is a mentor in the “Women in Tech” program at ASB and also leads a few initiatives within Engineering practice.
After working for a few years in New Zealand, she became a committee member of the Institute of Engineers Sri Lanka New Zealand (IESL NZ) chapter and contributed to supporting the Sri Lankan community in NZ. She was a member of the advisory panel in a Webinar organized by the IESL NZ chapter for migrant engineers. She is an active committee member and contributes to organizing various events for Sri Lankan Engineers living in NZ. This was another opportunity for her to build a network with like-minded professionals.
Ayesha lives in Auckland with her husband and daughter. She loves spending her leisure time with friends and family. She still continues to play social basketball in NZ. She has volunteered to coach basketball and netball for kids in NZ. Ayesha’s QA journey shows how sportsmanship helps to build key niche skills that help to survive in the IT industry. Her story empowers next-generation QA engineers to build confidence and start their QA careers with high standards.
Lastly, she mentioned that setting up a mindset of continuous learning, taking risks, accepting challenges, and working towards passion would make you unstoppable.
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