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, with a throughput of 1000+ tests per day, enhancing testing efficiency and reliability.* Enabled sharing hardware resoures and automated testing accessibility across the organization while ensuring uninterrupted operations through orchestrated deployment and update strategies.* Led the development of additional tools to automate testing and validation processes for snaps, kernels, and various applications, catering to the needs of multiple teams within the company.* Contributed to organizational expansion by actively participating in the recruitment process, conducting applicant reviews, and interviewing hundreds of candidates to ensure the acquisition of top-tier talent.Professional Development:* Continuously growing expertise through ongoing professional development activities and staying abreast of emerging technologies

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:* Building 3d printed robots to automatically recover bricked phones* Instrumenting phones with breakout boards to access the buttons with relays* Developing microservices in python, talking over rabbitmq, deployed to our Openstack cloud with juju* Writing new code and documentation to automate device provisioning and testing* Managing and improving legacy automation based on Jenkins* Monitoring the infrastructure with tools like Nagios, Kibana, and Logstash* Participating in devops support, on call for notifications from Pagerduty

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, execution, bug tracking and prioritization, and signoff for release from a QA perspective. My team was also responsible for testing kernel updates on a variety of platforms to ensure they do not break existing stable releases that are still being supported.During my time in this role, we started producing tablet and phone images, and I was responsible for creating the initial testing process which included automated provisioning of phones and tablets, running tests on them, and gathering the results so they could be picked up by a dashboard. Jenkins, combined with custom tools written mostly in python were mainly used for this. The phone and tablet releases happened with more devices, and on a fast cadence than the desktop and server releases. Quickly bootstrapping the automated installation and test processes was critical so that we could start releasing well-tested image updates immediately.

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 planning, development, and execution of tests for special projects. As the technical lead for this team, I'm responsible for providing feedback and recommendations about our monthly release process and help ensure that our monthly releases are validated and made ready in time for release.

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 development boards such as ARM Vexpress, PandaBoard, STE Snowball, Samsung Origen, Freescale mx5, and more. Tests were performed on Android and Ubuntu based platforms by Linaro. This system handled automated installation on target devices, test execution, and results storage, and was built completely in Python.For my role, I was the manager of the team as well as the technical lead responsible for day to day development, code review and merging, release management, gathering requirements and feedback, planning for future improvements, and even day-to-day development on the codebase.

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 have it completed ahead of schedule.Other tasks included working at customer locations worldwide to design, implement, and customize IBM e1350 cluster systems. Bringup and validate hardware, install cluster management software, perform remote OS installation via PXE boot, install additional software such as compilers, schedulers, MPI libraries, and drivers. Implement high speed interconnects and switch configuration for ethernet, infiniband, and Myrinet. Perform overall cluster validation and problem detection using a variety of single system and clustered benchmarks such as stream, Linpack, and Pallas (Intel MPI Benchmark). The clusters I built ranged from small application clusters for SAP BIA, to 512+ node HPC clusters that made the Top 500 list. Additionally, I provided ongoing 24x7 support to customers on their clusters. Since this was a new offering, I participated in defining the process, establishing the support model, influencing contract details, and developing relationships with the customers to facilitate additional future business opportunities.

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 to go the extra mile and hunt down the cause of a bug or write a patch. I am currently the team lead for a small group testing the Xen Hypervisor. Past experience includes test automation development, code coverage analysis, realtime Linux testing, kernel testing (on multiple architectures), and Next Generation Posix Threads. I also did testing on pSeries Linux, where I was responsible for testing on RedHat/SuSE enterprise distributions, DLPAR, hotplug cpu, and HVSI. I have good experience with a range of IBM xSeries and pSeries hardware including x and p blades (JS20, HS20, LS20, etc).

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 fixed. I tested these products and gained more experience on a variety of platforms including many versions of AIX, Solaris, HPUX, NT/Windows 2000, and NetWare. I also wrote and used scripts to assist in automation of testing these products. Most of these were written in Unix shell scripts or Perl.