Marc Schifer Phone: (408) 888-4233 email: mschifer at oddthoughts dot net

Summary:
Over twenty years experience designing and implementing automated testing tools and procedures in production environment with over twelve years team lead/management experience.
Experienced in working across multiple product lines with a special interest in working in a multiplatform environment.

Technical Summary

Proficient Linux, Solaris (SunOS), Windows (NT/95/98/2000/XP), DOS, PERL, Segue Silk (QA Partner), Bourne and C shell scripting, Python, Auto IT Oracle SQL, MySQL, dBASE (III and IV) HTML, CSS, PHP, CGI Programming

Familiar Java,C/C++ Javascript, CVS, RCS MacOS Tcl/expect

Work Experience:

BLUECOAT
Packeteer Acquired by Blue Coat June 2008
Sr. Manager Sunnyvale Automation and Engineering Lab / Automation Architect - June 2008 - Present
Manage the Sunnyvale Automation Team (7 people), responsible for the primary test system and framework design and development as well as manage the main engineering lab for Development and QA.

• Automation Team
• Lead the effort to integrate the Blue Coat and Packeteer test systems under one front end process with integrated reporting.
• Extended existing frameworks to support newly acquired product lines
• Increased the number priority 1 test cases to provide over 73% coverage.
• Leading the effort to design new modular test system capable of supporting all product lines and the ability to support everything from simple standalone testing to fully automated systems
• Engineering Lab
  Manage a team of 2 people responsible for the maintenance, operations and support of the primary engineering lab consisting of 200 racks of equipment.
• Over see the CapEx budget for all of QA
• Responsible for purchasing of new equipment and maintaining support contracts.
• Manage resource allocation and lab space
• Ensure basic infrastructure is in place to support new projects.
• Coordinate lab expansion project to minimize impact on project schedules
• Lead planning effort to build out new engineering lab in the new India office

PACKETEER
Sr Manager - Automation and Tools, Manufacturing Test and Engineering Lab Support - July 2006 - June 2008
Manage a diverse set of teams providing support for Product Development, QA and Operations.

• Automation Tools Team,
  As below with manager of Automation team reporting to me.
• Internal Tools and Engineering Lab Team
  Provide general infrastructure support and services for Product development and QA teams.
• Responsible for overseeing all purchases of hardware and software for engineering lab
• Oversee the development of internal bug tracking, project and document management tools.
• Manufacturing Test Team
  Work closely with Operations and Engineering to develop test procedures and deployment processes for Fulfillment house to install software and verify final assembly of all Packeteer products.
• Manage small team to create and maintain the final manufacturing and verification processes for all Packeteer products
• Developed Restore to Factory Default application for iShaper and iShared products.

Principal Engineer June 2003 - June 2006
Automation Tools Team Lead. Build the Automation and Tools support team. Create test automation systems and tools for all of Packeteer's PacketShaper, iShared, SkyX and Centeral Management tools.

• Manage a team of 6 people responsible for developing automated testing tools and general infrastructure support for PacketWise and PolicyCenter QA
• Design an automated testing system for PacketShaper products
• Developed automatically re-configurable network test system using programmable level 1 network switches. Written in Perl, Python, MySQL, Visual C++ .Net and Segue Silk with a PHP based web Interface

BROADCOM BROADBAND PROCESSOR BUSINESS UNIT
Sr QA and Release Engineer June 2002 - May 2003
Create automated build and test system for the Sytems Groups software development team.

• Created nightly build and test system for testing compiler changes
• Developed regression analysis reporting tool in Perl and Tcl/Expect, for comparing DejaGnu test results

RED HAT INC.
Applications Developer Jan 2001 - April 2002
Developed and maintained database synchronization tools and resolved data corruption issues

• Worked with Oracle databases, applications and Perl scripts.
• Wrote utilities in Perl and SQL to fix most common data problems

Manager Quality Engineering Aug 1999 - Jan 2001
Managed a team of up to 6 quality engineers in 3 locations around North America supporting GNU Pro Tools ,Source Navigator, Cygwin, Code Fusion and the Embedded Developers Kit (EDK)

CYGNUS SOLUTIONS (Acquired by Red Hat Inc in Jan 2000)
Technical Lead Jan 1999 - Aug 1999
Created tools and processes to improve the quality of all Cygnus products.

• Created continuous build and test system in perl with web interface for reporting results.
• Defined general testing strategy for Cygnus' products
• Built a Q.E. team from the ground up

NETSCAPE COMMUNICATIONS
Technical Lead - Internal Tools and Automation Group May 1996 - Jan 1999
Designed, developed and implemented automated testing tools for Netscape's browses and servers and manage automated test lab.

• Designed and implemented a multi-platform automated testing system to queue, execute and track results of automated test scripts.
• Lead of development team for web based test case management system using CGI/Perl with an Oracle 7 back end.
• Develop Utilities in C/C++ and Java to aid the Q.A. groups in doing their job.

BORLAND INTERNATIONAL
Contractor: SR. Q.A. Engineer - Internet Products Group Jan 1996 - May 1996
Developed automated testing harness in java for doing unit testing of Borland's java class library

TALIGENT
SR. Q.A. Engineer - Functional Verification Test Aug 1995 - Jan 1996
Responsibilities include developing and maintaining internal tools written in C++ running under AIX. Additionally responsibilities for creating test plans and developing tests in C++ for the CommonPoint application development framework.

ORACLE
Contractor : Q.A. Engineer - Client Server Systems Div. Feb 95 - July 1995
Wrote test plan and automated test scripts using Q.A. Partner for the local database, Query By Form and unbound control subsystems of ORACLE Power Objects. Additional duties included attending bug council.

BORLAND INTERNATIONAL
R&D Engineer II - Team lead for Internal Tools team. 1992 - 1995
Design and implement tools for Windows, DOS and UNIX using C/C++, and various scripting languages. Lead design review and guide team priorities.

ASHTON-TATE
Member Technical Staff I - Engineering Support 1990 - 1991
Responsible for developing tools for and the administration of Ashton- Tate's automated test system and bug tracking database. Assisted in the administration of the R&D UNIX servers, including Sun SPARCstations, NeXTs and a Pyramid.

Q.A. Engineer II 1989 - 1990
Responsible for testing approximately one half of the dBASE IV 1.1 language elements. This included the creation of test plans, doing code reviews on test suites, and the development of automated tests.

XXCAL
Consultant to Ashton-Tate 1988 - 1989
Worked as a Q.A. Engineer on dBASE IV 1.0 Developed tests plans for areas assigned to me and created semi automated tests. Setup OS/2 Lan for testing client server edition.

 

This page last updated March 2010