At FarSight I am a QA and Release engineer. I am responsible for the release cycle: Freeze, Group Tests, bailout rehearsal, eve-of-release hotswap build, the release decision, a well-prepared release team, and the release notes. I maintain the farbug buglog database and I monitor patching.

I also run various automated tests. I strive to know how to run manually all software released to the public or the back office. I "own" contexts qaSolaris & dev-qaSolaris and the associated databases, which I convert, refresh, reap, and/or sanitize as required. I am striving to pump database qa_huge up to be an order of magnitude bigger than production. One of the purposes of context dev-qaSolaris, which uses qa_huge, is to anticipate quality issues several releases into the future. It is a continuing challenge to try to test the software on various platforms, and to keep an eye on performance.

I also build my casey playpen regularly in the hope that I will have time to test for defects in code that has been committed but not yet frozen. The earlier in the cycle we catch a defect the cheaper it is to fix. I also keep an eye on my production FarSight accounts, since they too yield software defect reports.

In a former position at BBN, I was a developer of Tcl GUIs. I have many years of professional experience programming in various procedural languages (Pl/1, Pascal, Basic), and I have taken C and C++ courses. I am a user of Unix, NT and Windows, and formerly was a user of VMS and IBM JCL.

I want to move towards programming automated tests & cgi/intranet QA aids, and away from release-and-build related systems stuff. Also, a software documentarian, should we ever hire one, would be welcome to take over the release notes. It has been good for me to do releases & release notes for a while, as those processes need QA-ing too; QA is about process improvement throughout the product life-cycle;

Now that I've committed to being a QA professional I want to use and customize commercial QA tools such as Seguay's or a product that integrates software problem tracking with source control and customer service's database. We have a lot of data, including server and performance logs and bug stats, that could be made useful if interpreted and massaged into useful reports using products such as those mentioned or simply standard NT tools such as Excel and Access. I could get into graphs and stats. I am very aware, however, that some of the sophisticated QA products can require a full-time person to do them justice, so I have no regrets about having used a simple, low-maintenance bug-tracking system to date at D. E. Shaw & Co. I had enough of a glimpse of X-runner (a product for testing graphical programs which diffs screen shots) while in CAD/CAM to know that it takes time that I currently do not have to get the most out of a full-featured tool.

The graphical & aesthetic aspects of a website particularly appeal to me, but I cannot figure out a way for my job to require use of Photoshop like Joel's and Jeff's jobs do :). I did get to paint the Model RR rolling stock for our recruitment party. Also I created icons for a couple of our back office NT apps.

Finally, I would be able and interested to do a stint in India if called upon.

M.A. in Mathematics, University Of Illinois; B.A. in Mathematics, St. Norbert College

I worked for two years in software support in the Speech Recognition group at BBN, ten years as a software developer at Sclumberger Cad/Cam (aka Applicon), five years as an applications programmer at Financial Publishing Company and three years at a London Software House programming Business/Financial Applications.

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Last revised: May 4, 1998