Christopher Simmons Email & Phone Number

● Conduct software testing functions on a Financial Aid Management application (PowerFAIDS.)● Provide guidance to others in carrying out QA duties, while performing software testing responsibilities. ● Establish and maintain technical testing methodologies and processes. ● Develop test strategies and plans. Oversees the development of and/or develops and maintains test data. ● Develop and deliver verbal and written status reports on the testing of the features. ● Work with software engineers and product owners to identify tests to ensure the quality and accuracy of story delivery. ● Assist in the confirmation of bugs reported from outside sources, document and communicate them to the development team. ● Assist in the identification, selection, and implementation of software tools and technologies, and testing techniques and procedures that facilitate automated testing and quality assurance.

Process improvement to better utilize PowerFAIDS and university system programs.● Assist other universities in utilizing PowerFAIDS and other Financial Aid software more efficiently● Create processes to increase efficiency for the Financial Aid department through complex Excel functionalityand advanced SQL queries.● Support other departments to expedite processes.● Communicate and process financial aid through the various outlets directed by the Federal government.● Assist Athletic Director with various reports by providing data. Information for both NAIA and scholarshipallotment.● Assumed role of Institutional Researcher. Gathered data for various reports:○ IPEDS○ ACHE○ National Clearinghouse○ Veterans AffairsAssist Admissions office with utilizing Liaison’s EMP product.○ Help with integrations of EMP with PowerFAIDS.○ Built integration process to utilize EMP’s award letters.● Took the initiative to learn VBA and XML● Lead on Financial Aid’s audit with Jackson-Thornton.● All-around problem solver.

● Accountable for analyzing requirements, understanding system capabilities, and writing specifications.● Participate proactively with scrum team members to effectively liaison between stakeholders company-wide.● Assists the organization in developing strategic business cases, as requested by Alfa Stakeholders.● Provide support for the development and implementation of strategic IT initiatives.

Description for SQL Server side within an Agile MethodologyIn summary: Responsible for acting as the gateway to production control for all IT projects. Validate code to be promoted, using QA principles, throughout the application life cycle. Refresh, synchronize and validate all IT testing and production environments.In detail: Responsibilities include• Ensure only tested, approved and properly traceable changes to testing and production environments are accepted and recorded, from the point of receipt to implementation.• Take part in the Release Management process in collaboration with the Configuration Manager, Project Manager, and production control personnel.• Ensure coordination between applications and projects in case of shared production environment changes.• Diagnose and resolve complex customer issues in accessing test environments.• Maintain traceability of all current and historical changes to IT test and production environments for each project and application throughout its life cycle.• Act early on as a partner of the project manager, application architect and lead developer for matters of deployment planning. Take a lead role in go/No-go decision making, based on environmental planning best practices.• Escalate, communicate and document any issues arising from operational/production jobs.• Track and control environmental changes.• Oversee all IT development and QA environments to maintain the integrity of the systems.• Produce and manage appropriate technical deliverables.Description for Mainframe within a Waterfall Methodology:• Research, debug, report CICS, DB2, Data, & and front end host code issues, take corrective action when applicable. Supported languages include COBOL, SQL, DYL280.• Tracking and monitoring of production systems/environments for issue identification and prevention.• Research, write, test, and execute DB2 data fixes related to severe data corruption needed to administer policies.• Report/Query generation.

• Balance daily, monthly, quarterly, yearly reports• Change headers in programs• Submit and prepare jobs for processing• Check forms and reports• Burst, decollate and distribute forms or reports• Maintain JCL’s• Operate PC for upload/downloads• Handle errors and report any errors to supervisor• Odd jobs assigned by supervisor