Ramsay Ashby Email & Phone Number

Falkirk, Gb

Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

As a Squad Lead in Skyscanner’s Direct Booking Tribe I have worked across a variety of micro-services across the full stack, and helped shape the future of Skyscanner’s strategy in this key business area. This influence has extended beyond Skyscanner itself and into the greater industry, providing feedback to IATA’s NDC workgroups & forums to help shape the future of the schema which ultimately will drive the future of sales & distribution for many of the world’s most established airlines. In addition to being a technical authority, a key part of my role as Squad Lead particularly as my team grew larger was in coaching and supporting team members to help them reach their potential.From the beginning of 2018, I line-managed a number of people and mentored several others. I coached and supported around seven people on a regular basis through regular 1-1s, in either a formal (i.e. line management) or informal capacity. I always strived to support and help people as best I could, which in turn generated great motivation for myself! Outside of my immediate team, I was a ‘Lean Ambassador’ for the wider Skyscanner business, regularly engaging with other teams to help them improve how they worked. Engagements varied significantly from helping to set up and facilitate retrospectives, to much larger engagements like squad or tribe refreshes, or TOC exercises to help them identify hidden bottlenecks. Agile and lean working practices were a keen passion of mine, and I enjoyed attending meet-ups (e.g. Lean Agile Edinburgh) to discuss and hear views of like-minded people.

Edinburgh

I have worked across a variety of teams in Skyscanner and played a key role in their transition from waterfall to agile working practices, and from 6-weekly release cycles to continuous integration and delivery. Working closely with developers and other test engineers, we automated our backlog of regression tests as well as the tests for new functionality, achieving automation of 100% of our regression test suite. Further, I developed tooling to assist manual verification and exploratory testing of new user stories. The majority of teams worked in one or two week Sprints and all test activities were completed as part of the team's Definition of Done. By designing and implementing an enhanced test framework runner we were able to reduce 'false positives' to near zero (see http://codevoyagers.com/2016/02/25/failing-fast-with-reliable-and-actionable-system-level-tests/ for more details)I assumed the role of Scrum Master in several teams, providing coaching and advice to teams and individuals to help them achieve their potential, ensuring that they were able to frequently release valuable working software and that the teams enjoyed the experience of doing so. I mentored and coached several interns and graduates, helping them to settle in to the business and become valuable and productive team members. I conceived several of Skyscanner's intern projects and then acted as Product Owner during their development. The projects included various services and utilities to aid our testing processes, including a metrics dashboard for our CD pipelines and a service for generating fully localised urls.