Saturday, October 18, 2008

Building Stuff

At yellowpages.com, I lead a Tools & Automation team.  In case you've ever wondered where MbUnit and Gallio fit into my work life, one of my responsibilities is managing a team of Test Automation Engineers.  We also use these tools for unit testing of our core systems.

Another one of my responsibilities is Release Engineering which is sort of an umbrella term governing processes related to Build, Deploy, Continuous Integration, System Monitoring, Defect Tracking, Source Control and the like.  In short, stuff that enables us to ship high-quality code when we want to.

I have built lots of great stuff as part of my job here:

  • For Unit Testing and Integration Testing, I built numerous extensions for MbUnit then eventually took up the lead on MbUnit v3 and Gallio.
  • For System Monitoring, I built a tool called Odin that has yet to be open-sourced itself but which did produce 3 OSS libraries, Castle.FlexBridge, Castle.Components.Cache and Castle.Components.Scheduler.
  • For FxCop integration in Visual Studio 2005, I built FxCopAddIn (now defunct).
  • For Build, I built MetaBuild, a lightweight modular build system.
  • For Deploy, I'm going to be building or borrowing something to replace what we've got...  I don't know what yet but I know I will want more help.
  • I've contributed little bits and pieces here and there to several other great OSS projects like Castle, Rhino.Mocks, WatiN, CruiseControl.Net and more.

I have also built a strong team that I am very proud of.  We build great things together!

Here are some other things my team has built:

  • A test scheduling and reporting system.
  • A diagnostic "inspector" tool for troubleshooting applications.
  • An automated test spider tool to search for broken links.
  • A comprehensive model and system test suite.
  • A phone-testing harness.

And there's tons more stuff to build!  Which reminds me...

Yet another one of my responsibilities is to recruit great talent.

Want to build cool stuff?  Call me!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yellow Pages is lucky to have you.
Thanks a lot for bringing a lot of goodies to the community.