Gary Brooks Email & Phone Number

Cheltenham, England, United Kingdom

Key Responsibilities• Provide technical leadership and innovation whilst accountable for the development of quality, complex and scalable automated solutions.• Identify testing tools and processes that align with the technologies already in place along with the skill set of the team• Define and maintain a roadmap for the implementation of the automation strategy aligned to the test pyramid model.• Monitor, mentor and collaborate in order to continually improve the use of automation techniques across the department.• Lead Engineers, distributed across many Agile delivery teams, through all aspects of automation testing ensuring that quality is embedded as early as possible, with a goal of achieving fast feedback, as part of the UCAS agile development lifecycle.• Coach, mentor and motivate engineers and relevant Core IT Partners resource in the best practise ofautomated testing of UCAS systems and services for the purpose of improving the general skill set of theteam and increasing knowledge of solutions.• Embed automated test solutions into the CI/CD pipeline.• Keep up to date with industry trends, continually horizon scanning for new tools, techniques andtechnologies which can further improve the automated test approach at UCAS.

Cheltenham, England, United Kingdom

Responsibilities including leading the design, developing UCAS sites and systems though an Agile methodology and approach. Provide mentoring and leadership in best practices of software development to every member of the MDT team. Organizing collaboration and working alongside other engineers within the team to evaluate technology and consistently apply best practices. Mentor other engineers and encourage good team morale.Lead composition of user story for existing and future product development, in a manner more easily understandable by all disciplines (Test, Development, Business).Notable achievements and deliveries – Single Sign On (SSO) – Building on existing technical design and functionality further moving to centralize login functionality to a new UCAS User Account Domain. Authentication / Authorization and User Profile Separation – Leading the push for the separation of verifying who a user is and what the user is permitted to do. Present design used in UCAS has mixed these concepts and are tightly coupled. Leading the design, roadmap, and development of new separate API’s, Separating the authentication and authorization process, will more easily allow integration of federated login functionality (e.g., Facebook, Google, or OpenID authentication, etc.)

Cheltenham, England, United Kingdom

Responsibilities including developing and designing UCAS sites and systems though an Agile methodology and approach. Provide ongoing maintenance, support and enhancements in existing systems and platforms. Collaborating and working alongside other engineers within the team to evaluate technology and consistently apply best practices. Mentor apprentice engineers and encourage good team morale.Notable achievements and deliveries – Single Sign On (SSO) – Led the team with technical design and functionality of the move to centralize login functionality to a new UCAS User Account Domain. OIDC Investigation – Led spike and investigation into UCAS potentially using the Gigya OIDC offering. Involving sign-in integration session management across multiple RP/clients and platforms. User Change Email – Led the design and provided technical guidance to the team on adding the ability for UCAS users to change their correspondence email and inform interested parties and integrated systems of that change. Agent Management Site – Major influence in the re-design of the database behind the Agents section of UCAS site. HMAC integration – Developed and integrated a system of protecting Rest API endpoints within UCAS. Allowing separate systems to use functionality in a secure way.

Cheltenham, England, United Kingdom

Responsibilities to bring skills of a Software Engineer with a testing bias to bare within a newly established role of Agile Test Engineer. Writing and conversion of new and existing test automation to a more Behavioral Driven Development approach.

Tewkesbury

• Test Automation Developer – Technical LeadThe role involved researching, designing, developing, deploying of test harness software and automated testing applications. Allowing the Test team to greatly improve the Test coverage and reduce the testing time needed to implement thorough testing. Lead a small team of Test Automation Engineers to achieve this, through mentoring and giving design direction.Involved using the Ranorex Professional Studio. This is a development platform that allows Test Automation. Test Solutions are written with the use of coding C# to perform and report on automated user tests. Written, and expanded upon, a low level ‘base’ utility in the form of a DLL. This is then used as the basis of all other test solutions used within the Test department. Other Test Automation Developers use this as a building block to quickly create other more specific test solutions. Lead the design and implementation of a daily overnight automated testing of nightly builds of our Symmetry Access Control software. This process picks up the latest daily build, installs the software on various Virtual machines (of differing operating systems), and runs an initial ‘Smoke Test’, followed by running a much more in-depth regression test. All the results of these tests are then displayed via a web link and emailed to the relevant parties. This allows the Test team to know each morning, whether a viable latest build is available to use for that day.

Tewkesbury

• G4S Symmetry Access Control DeveloperSymmetry is a leading-edge security management system designed for buildings of any kind, which combines all aspects of security into a single well-designed and future-proof software solution suitable for any size application.My role was to maintain and further the design and development of the product software. This involved writing design documents to follow SRS documents, and then onto developing the software using C++ as a main code base with some new modules written in C#.

Tewkesbury

• G4S PayChannel DeveloperPayChannel operates a PCI Level 1 compliant payment gateway which enables processing and management of credit card payments made at unattended terminals (ticketing machines), via the web, over the phone, and through mail efficiently and securely. My role was to help maintain the settlement process of PayChannel (Bank final authorization of transactions) further the development using technologies such as C#, Mona, Rail and NHibernate.• G4S TopGuard Patrol Plus Software DeveloperProxiPen TopGuard Patrol is a cost effective tool for the set up and management of guard tours. The software allows the customer to set up tours for guards, download and evaluate data and prepare reports.My role was to maintain and further the design and development of the product software. This involved writing basic drivers for hardware and developing the software using VB as a main code base with some OCX controls (calendar, tour graphical display etc.) written in C++.• G4S PlanTime Software DeveloperPlanTime is a time and attendance tool for the set up and management of flexible working hours. The software allows the customer to set up and record flexible working hours, and prepare reports. Now a legacy product mainly used in Council Offices.As this was a legacy product my role was to in maintain and bug fix existing software. This involved reacting to support requests, reproducing problems, then finding solutions and producing patched software. The product software involved was written using VB as a main code base with several modules and services written in C++.

Mitcheldean, Gloucestershire

• Xerox world renowned company who are a leader in document technology and services.I worked here part-time (full-time during the summer) whilst studying for my degree at Cardiff University.My role was to liaise with different departmental managers to identify potential areas where computing software could improve the running, manufacturing and production of Xerox solutions. This usually meant creating QA database analysis software using MS Access or MS Excel software with code written in VBA. To achieve this I would gather an in-depth knowledge of the numbers and statistics needed to improve departmental visibility of line production and employee output. Design and develop a software solution that would then allow calculation and display of relevant statistics.

Stroud, Gloucestershire

• Redler are a bulk materials handling engineering company delivering solutions across a range of industries, including the food industry. Redler are among the global leaders in bulk material handling, particularly within the Food Industries.I started here as an apprentice production engineer. Eventually after 4 years of learning on the job and day release to college, I qualified as a Technical Production Engineer.My skills were to read technical drawing (blue prints), ascertain what material were needed, and build the structure (usually a conveyor of some kind) using sheet metal skills such as welding, shearing and shaping.