User Profile
Professional Journey Overview
As an IFGICT Fellow and seasoned technology professional with over 18 years of experience in Enterprise Application Modernization with a focus on Regulatory Systems Integration and Automated Quality Engineering, Lalitha Potharalanka has established herself as a transformative leader across critical sectors including federal healthcare regulation, telecommunications infrastructure, and financial services. Her comprehensive expertise spans the complete software development lifecycle, from enterprise test automation and quality assurance to advanced low-code platform development and regulatory system integration.
Currently serving as Senior Appian Developer at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration since June 2022, Lalitha leads the architecture and implementation of scalable, enterprise-grade low-code solutions. Her expertise spans the full application development lifecycle, including process orchestration, SAIL-based UI development, data architecture, and integration with external systems via Web APIs, RDBMS, and other enterprise services.
Her career trajectory showcases progressive evolution from foundational quality assurance and test automation roles to senior enterprise application development positions. At Universal Service Administrative Company, she architected, engineered, and deployed resilient low-code applications on the Appian platform to optimize business workflows and enhance operational efficiency, delivering scalable solutions across HR, finance, and customer service verticals while spearheading the design and implementation of workflow automation systems.
Innovation Excellence in Enterprise Solutions
Lalitha's technical expertise encompasses comprehensive enterprise application modernization, from complex automation framework development to sophisticated regulatory system integrations. Her work demonstrates exceptional capability in translating business and functional requirements into technical specifications, leveraging modern platforms to deliver scalable, maintainable, and high-performance solutions that serve diverse stakeholder communities across government and private sectors.
Her experience in automated quality engineering spans multiple tools and frameworks, including Selenium WebDriver, UFT, TestNG, and advanced CI/CD pipeline integration. At Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America, she developed and optimized test automation frameworks achieving a 70% reduction in manual testing efforts and significantly enhancing the efficiency of regression testing for financial applications. She successfully integrated automation suites into CI/CD pipelines, enabling continuous testing and delivering faster feedback.
Throughout her tenure at Wells Fargo and IBM India, Lalitha led enterprise test automation initiatives that reduced manual testing by 60-70% while overseeing QA for million dollar client projects, ensuring on-time delivery with zero critical defects. Her work included developing scalable test automation frameworks using UFT, implementing data-driven testing methodologies, and establishing standardized testing practices across distributed teams.
Transformative Impact Through Technology Leadership
Throughout her distinguished 18-year career, Lalitha has demonstrated exceptional ability to lead cross-functional teams in delivering enterprise application modernization initiatives that drive organizational transformation. She collaborates with Business Analysts, QA, DevOps, and Product Owners to align technical solutions with business objectives in Agile/Scrum and SAFe frameworks, consistently delivering solutions that bridge traditional enterprise architectures with modern automation platforms.
Her regulatory systems integration expertise includes designing and managing integrations with external systems using Web APIs, Connected Systems (REST/SOAP), service-backed records, and database connectivity (JDBC). She designs secure solutions by implementing RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), leveraging enterprise security frameworks and environment-specific access restrictions to meet stringent compliance requirements in federal and financial services environments.
From her foundational roles in comprehensive quality assurance and test automation to her current leadership in enterprise low-code development, she has consistently delivered measurable improvements in system performance, reliability, and operational efficiency. Her work spans multiple domains including functional, regression, integration, and end-to-end testing across web and enterprise applications, utilizing advanced tools and methodologies to ensure product quality and accelerate release cycles.
Advancing ICT Innovation Through IFGICT Fellowship
Through her IFGICT fellowship, Lalitha significantly amplifies her contributions to information and communication technology advancement, particularly in enterprise application modernization and regulatory technology innovation. She leverages her extensive 18-year expertise in automated quality engineering and enterprise system integration to drive research initiatives focused on next-generation regulatory compliance frameworks and citizen-centric digital services.
Her fellowship enables collaboration with global ICT leaders to establish best practices for enterprise application modernization and regulatory systems integration, contributing to standardization efforts that benefit organizations worldwide. The fellowship positions her to mentor emerging professionals in automated quality engineering methodologies while advancing research in areas such as AI-assisted testing frameworks, automated compliance validation, and scalable integration architectures.
The broader impact of her fellowship work extends to developing innovative approaches for large-scale digital transformation in government agencies, creating reusable automation frameworks and quality engineering practices that can be adopted across multiple regulatory domains. Her research contributions through IFGICT help establish new paradigms for enterprise application modernization that balance rapid deployment capabilities with the rigorous security, compliance, and reliability requirements of mission-critical regulatory systems.