Scott Mcdowell Email & Phone Number

Dublin, County Dublin, Ireland

In this role I was one of the founding members of the Cloud Transition Engineering Pod and played a pivotal role in establishing the Cloud Transition Practice, alongside some key stalwarts of the Guidewire Upgrade Practice. This required me to drive innovation and quality across several teams, provide technical leadership when required, and empower others to be as successful as possible. I was the technical architect for a completely homegrown IntelliJ IDEA plugin that automates a large portion of the technical tasks required in a Guidewire Cloud Transition project or Self-Managed Upgrade project. This allowed me to work alongside another architect to both design the system from the ground up and create a proof of concept that went on to allow us assemble a team of several highly talented individuals. This role required me to work closely with our Product Owner and Engineering Manager to ensure the team had a constant stream of work and that all Sprint, quarterly, and yearly goals were being met, while constantly looking for ways to improve both our processes and the teams' tooling. The team consistently delivered over the targeted a 20% reduction in manual effort year on year, with effort in certain areas being reduced by up to 85%.

I took on the Tech Lead role for one of the first customers to upgrade to version 10 of the InsuranceSuite software. Several track leads would report to me and I was responsible for the technical delivery of the project. This required communication with distributed teams across different time zones, both within Guidewire and customer offices. I worked closely with upper management during inception, delivery, stabilisation, and production go-live to ensure all aspects of the customer installation were covered. This also included hardware recommendations and application/database server configuration. This role allowed me to mentor several members of the team, junior and senior, in a multitude of areas such as specific Guidewire configuration changes, Git best practices and software development best practices.I assumed the role of Project Manager for the final few months of the project and continued to project the customer with expert guidance to bring the project under budget and ahead of schedule. I also began to assess customer configurations to determine a high level effort estimate, which could be translated into a cost metric for the business. I helped to define what the assessment practice is today and created several whitepapers on different topics which are still in use. It was during this time that I began to develop tooling to automate parts of the assessment process. The most notable tool was the Assessment Inspection Tool which allowed static code analysis in the form of inspections (both Guidewire and JetBrains) to be executed against any customer codebase. Prior to this it was not possible to inspect versions older than 9 and required a very deliberate setup to do so. AIT provided a easy mechanism by which this could be done and is still heavily used in Guidewires assessment pipeline. I also created a Spring Boot version of some tools to allow the easy creation of Docker images via the JIB gradle plugin.

Worked with Guidewire customer resources including Business Analysts and Architects to deliver business requirements in accordance with both Guidewire and industry best practices. I originally worked as part of a small team in Dublin on a greenfield project for one of North America's largest Tier 1 carriers. This team then grew to over a dozen people and I assumed the role of team lead. The most memorable experience during this time was working closely with a customer Architect to develop a dependency injection framework that leveraged several low level features of both Java and Gosu.During this time I transitioned to Guidewire's Upgrade Practice and lead a PolicyCenter track upgrading from version 7 to version 9. This involved coordinating with other Guidewire tracks for other products, working closely with the Project Manager on both the Customer and Guidewire sides, and liaising with other customer resources to ensure existing functionality worked, at worst, the same as before, or was greatly improved with the new software. One such example was reducing quote turnaround times from a portals request from ~10 seconds to under a second. This involved extensive knowledge of the workflow in question, profiling the code, and understanding what queries were being executed in the background.

Ireland

Dublin, Ireland

I started my Software Development internship with Revenue in February 2014. I hope to expand my current skills set and apply knowledge gained from my time spent in college. The role mainly focuses on web and mobile development, both encompassing heavy database work.

Education record

Education record