Sep ‘16 - Current

Military Solution (Lockheed Martin)

Havant

Test Engineer
I am currently working under contract for Lockheed Martin on a Military Solution. The project is still in its design phase so I'm busy working away planning test activities up to 2020.

Nov ‘16 - Current

Stores Management (Safran Helicopter Engines)

Fareham

Soultion Developer
I’m busy working away on the final phase of a VBA project for Safran HE to help with their warehouse management.

Jul ’15 – Jul ‘16

GDMS – OS (Ordnance Survey)

Southampton

Test Engineer
Working  with Ordnance Survey as a test engineer within a small ‘Integration and special assignments team’. Working within an agile methodology, we test upgrades to a legacy distributed Oracle solution which is responsible for the extraction, modification, submission and publication of geographic data. During this period I have become familiar with some oracle products such as ‘Workspace Manager’ and ‘Oracle Spatial’.

Feb ’15 – Jul ‘15

CISCO Upgrade – NATS (National Air Traffic Control)

Whiteley

Test Engineer
This was my second period contracted to NATS as a Test Engineer. I’ve was responsible for the test design and execution for miscellaneous upgrades to the systems LAN Ethernet. During this period I was challenged with testing complex changes to Cisco switching, in areas of networking previously known as a black art; STP (Spanning Tree Protocol) and NAT (Network Address Translation).

Feb ’11 – Feb ‘15

Postal Projects - Lockheed Martin

Havant

Test & Integration Engineer / Test Lead
I returned to Lockheed Martin for a third time within the integration and test team to work ‘MEARS’ (Mail piece Events & Attribute Recognition System), Royal Mail’s replacement system for AI (Address Interpretation). The first year was spent re-validating the existing software on the newer, faster hardware.

Whilst the MEARS project continued; I spent the second year of the contract leading a team of testers for AP’s (Australia Post’s) new sort plan management solution, ‘OSPMS’. Whilst maintaining a hands on lead role, I visited AP’s office in Melbourne integrating the first beta version of OSPMS to the customers own environment. When encountering issues arising from differences of the UK based environments, I was able (under pressure) to quickly use my analytical skills, together with ingenuity to leave a fully functioning system behind.

After finishing with Australia Post, I returned to supporting Royal Mail projects for final two years, providing post FAT integration testing, interfacing with mail processing machines within an operational environment (leading on to early rollout). During this time, I also spent considerable effort creating a generic test execution standard, together with the tools required to do so. For the system soak test, I automated much of the effort using a combination of; dos scripting, PowerShell, Unix shell scripting (bash), AWK and SQL queries.

Sep ’08 – Feb ‘11

iFACTS Projects – NATS (National Air Traffic Control)

Whiteley

Test Engineer
I joined the ATC company within the “Infrastructure Test Team” for the iFACTS project. I was responsible for running regression tests for various ancillary systems; RDP (Radar Processing), Voice Comms, MSRS (Record and Playback Facility). I quickly found my niches in both testing the MSRS system and running performance tests for network continuity (A token ring network).

In the last year of the contract, I trained a new starter to use and test the MSRS system and began myself working within the “FDP (Flight Data Processing) Test Team”. Within this team I was given CR’s for which I was to manage the full testing cycle. Changes to the system usually consisted of changing the display properties for flights given various characteristics in their data. This involved spending much time looking at a large amount of diagnostics data produced both by NERC (Legacy System) and iFACTS.

Aug ’07 – Sep ‘08

SpecSavers – Manufacturing Labs

Eastleigh

Test & Integration Engineer / Test Lead
Working within an Agile team I was responsible for testing software released by SpecSavers Retail Systems to their franchised manufacturing labs (JVLabs). The customers had constantly changing requirements for their suite of applications which consisted of more than a hundred legacy applications. Alongside completing the requested updates to the Paradox based legacy system, a longer-term strategy was also being implemented to migrate all the applications across to MySQL. Within the test team, I was designated the testing of the ‘back end’ database programs as this took advantage of my technical background.

Towards the end of the project before the old systems were decommissioned, I was given the responsibility as the test lead. This period lasted for 2-3 months before I was left as the sole tester on the project, managing the teams remaining testing requirements. Throughout the contract I created testing tools and test management applications to aid the teams efficiency. With no deployment team and myself as the sole tester I also adopted the role of deployment / integration engineer and worked with the end users for extended periods on site.

Apr ’06 – May ‘07

Postal Projects - Lockheed Martin

Havant

Test & Integration Engineer
I was responsible for testing a new service to Royal Mail’s business customers. The service, ‘Clean Mail Advanced’, was implemented within the framework of an existing solution provided by the same team. The project followed a V-Model methodology.
I created test cases from requirements documentation, which were reviewed before testing commenced. The system comprised of multiple Oracle databases on both AIX & Windows platforms. I created/coded a suite of scripts and converters to assist in test execution. After the analytical work was complete and the software delivered, I was also responsible for the test execution and defect management. Test Director was used as the repository for all test scripts and defects.
Once the software was delivered and agreed to have passed all test exit criteria, I began to work along side the software engineer to assist in user training, roll out and supporting the customer as and when they required.

Jan ’06 – Apr ‘06

Inland Revenue project – IS Integration

Preston

Test Analyst
Contracted to IS Integration I began the role of a Test Analyst, working on a system for the Inland Revenue to validate and process inward files from larger companies. The system validates standard forms (including ‘Edifact’ formats) such as the P45 and P11, prepares them, and forwards the output to the relevant departments systems. Working on a system validating the nation’s tax returns the depth of coverage was extensive. My role was to define the test cases to ensure all possible file formats were covered for a given form, and to produce the accompanying test data samples.
Within a team of fourteen we worked remotely from the test execution site allowing me to develop my analytical skills. Whilst gaining the further experience I desired for test analysis, my main contribution to the team was creating a suite of tools to automate many of the more repetitive tasks of the test analysts. These tools were primarily to aid the creation of test data files, and were created using Visual Basic 6.0, Bash shell scripts and VBA (used within Microsoft Excel).

Aug ’05 – Jan ‘06

Littlewoods project – IS Integration

Liverpool

Test Analyst
During this contract I worked on the debt collection side of a retail project “Business Optimisation Programme (BOP)”, to merge the IT systems of Littlewoods and Shop Direct. My role as test analyst included working within a small team analysing the test specification and requirements to produce a list of test cases and designing the test steps to accompany them. The project followed the PASS methodology.

After completing the script preparation I was also responsible for the manual execution of them, recording the defects and re-testing the fixes. We used Test Director as a repository for the project. When analysing the test case failures, I investigated them prior to raising defects by querying the oracle databases (using Toad) and investigating input, output and log files on a Unix server via telnet.

Sep ‘02 – Aug ‘05

Royal Mail Project - Lockheed Martin

Havant

Performance Test Engineer
I joined Lockheed Martin as part of a team responsible for creating the procedures for new function of AI (Royal Mail’s postal automation system). My role started by specialising in developing the Visual Basic tools that were required to complete the tasks of ‘address research’.

The role developed into investigation and testing of performance faults, such as the mis-assignment of mail items. The system is based on both NT and Unix platforms. I used the following tools to investigate the faults: Bash shell scripting, PVCS Tracker, WinRunner, SQL Plus, Oracle Databases and Remedy. I was responsible for investigating 166 performance failures. This involved analysis of the failures, making changes to the configuration or databases and creating software defects reports.

After the system performance was accepted, I began system testing later builds of a data entry tool. I executed these test director based tests, raised PTR’s (defects) and re-tested the failures in later builds. Along side this I started working on integrating new software components for the French postal authority ‘La Poste’. The task was to create an automated demonstration of how the system would perform in the proposal phase of the project. I created the demonstration scripts using a variety of bash scripts, command files and NT tools.