2004 Senior Tools Specialist/R&D/Xtralis Australia

Senior Tools Specialist managing the Melbourne product development tools infrastructure. A sole position, providing internal consulting services to Xtralis in order to achieve maximum business benefits from the deployment of Development Tools. The role also included a major project of migrating the complete infrastructure to a new building, new servers and new domain.  Xtralis (ex Vision Fire and Security) is a global leader in very early warning smoke detection, fire protection system monitoring and control, with the Melbourne site having 200 staff, with 40 developers.

High Level Tasks:

• Fitting tools and associated processes to business needs
• “Hard coding” business processes
• Liaising with business stakeholders internal and external (such as contract renegotiations)
• Managing Support interactions with vendors (such as IBM)
• Assistance with Adelaide Product Development site (ADPRO)
• Troubleshooting
• Staff Training

Medium Level Tasks:

• IBM Rational ClearCase Administration (Configuration Management)
• IBM Rational ClearQuest Administration (Process Management)
• IBM Rational Test Administration (Testing Infrastructure Management)
• IBM Rational RequisitePro Administration (Requirements Management)
• IBM Rational RoseRT UML, Mathworks Matlab Administration (Development Tool Management)
• License Server Administration (High availability of licenses for all products)
• Managing the Standard Operating Environment of client machines
• Managing Integrations (Compilers, MS Office, Databases, inter-tool)
• Intranet Administration
• Process Documentation
• Tools Research and Advice (i.e. investigating alternatives)

Low Level Tasks:

• Development of tool integrations (C#, Perl, Visual Basic, Shell, Php, ClearCase triggers, batch)
• Troubleshooting network issues
• Database Administration (Oracle 8i, 10G2, Sybase, DB2, Access)
• Server Administration (Solaris, Redhat Linux, Windows Server, VMware ESX Server)
• Licensing collection and statistics
• User account management

Senior Test Engineer (1 year initial role) designing and executing functional and system level integration tests within the Test Engineering Group in support of developing Very Early Smoke Detection systems. The role included working with Matlab to help develop a model based testing strategy.

Projects:

• VesdaNet System Test: System testing of new fire protection (VLF) network interface card
• Open HLI: System testing of High Level Interface (to VesdaNet) card updates
• Display: System testing of display updates
• VLx: System/Product Test Lead on new VESDA product range
• Data Gathering: Research project into product field performance
• Relay Card: System/Product Test on new (VLF) relay interface.