Paul Larson Email & Phone Number

Austin, TX, US

Key Contributions:* Architected and developed sophisticated automation tools for Ubuntu certification testing, empowering automated deployment and updates across a spectrum of hardware devices, from IoT devices to enterprise servers.* Engineered a distributed server architecture featuring scalable agent-driven control of 1000+ devices across multiple labs.

This is a placeholder for all of my time at Canonical, where I've occupied various positions. See the other detailed descriptions of work done at Canonical, and also Linaro where I was still working at Canonical, but designated to work full time on helping to bring Linaro up from the beginning.

In the CI team, I was part of an agile team to develop microservices on internal and external Openstack clouds for providing automated continuous integration testing services. In this role, I developed tools for everything from package testing on cloud instances, to automation of development boards and phones. Some of the things this included were:*.

As the technical lead for the Ubuntu QA Release Team, I acted as the QA point of contact for release tasks for multiple releases of Ubuntu desktop and server images. During the release cycle, my team was responsible for testing each and every respin of each milestone image to ensure the highest quality release possible. I was responsible for test planning.

Responsible for forming and managing a new team at Linaro focused on providing QA services to the organization. For this role, I consolidated QA from our Android and Ubuntu platform teams into a single team focused on tracking the testing and results for our monthly ARM processor based releases, as well as working with additional development teams on.

Responsible for forming and managing a team in Linaro that builds automated test infrastructure and tools, designing the system, technical leadership, planning upcoming features, coordinating the team and releases.In this role we created a new platform called LAVA (Linaro Automated Validation Architecture) focused on providing test automation for ARM based.

In this role, I was responsible for working on infrastructure and tools to support Linaro development and testing. I started at Linaro in the very beginning before it even had a name. Because of that, I had the opportunity to not only work on technical solutions, but to help define the culture and tools that would lay the groundwork for the future.

As part of the Mobile QA team, I developed and executed tests for things like netbooks, ARM development boards, and early prototypes of embedded solutions. I worked closely with other teams to file and track bugs, and improve the overall quality of Ubuntu in the process.

As a member of the Linux on POWER Device Driver Team, I worked on testing and development of device drivers for current IBM POWER systems. I tracked bugs in bugzilla, and worked with upstream kernel developers, Linux distributions such as Redhat and Suse, and device vendors to integrate fixes and enhancements.

This was both a customer-facing and a technical role. While on-site at a customer location, I developed a solution that took a task that normally took any member of our team a week to do down to 2 days. This meant we could handle more installs of this type of cluster more efficiently, and more reliably than doing it by hand. The customer was ecstatic to.

I currently work in the Linux Technology Center on the Test team. I develop and am one of the maintainers of the Linux Test Project, an automated test suite for Linux. In this job, I have had the opportunity to work with quite a few open source projects. Most of my work has been in test creation, execution, and writing bug reports. Occasionally I have time.

Responsible for testing Tivoli Products such as Distributed Monitoring and Tivoli Enterprise Console, as well as verification of patches. I also gained experience with several other Tivoli products. Defects found are checked into a version control and defect tracking system, and I followed the defects through their life cycle until I verified they were.