Brought to help with migration testing for integrating existing Salesforce platform with PPL’s new Workday financial suite. The role includes validation across Integration, End-to-End, and Parallel testing phases to ensure correct transfer and reconciliation of membership and payment data for global artist payments.

ETL Process, Data quality and Reports testing on Banking Credit Risk Reporting DWH. Following data lineage 1) Checking data quality from source systems with an in house built SQL test suite. 2) Running parallel calculations to test calc engine outputs. 3) Verifying calc outputs get to the correct cells on reports. My role was test lead, defining the approach, resource, data and environment requirements, guiding the team to create what was required, identifying the metrics and reporting to programme management.

Working with Royal London's Cloud Data Platform, creating tools and process for the BAU team to follow for data testing. Investigated the use of Gherkin for use in data testing, piloted use of Great Expectations data quality testing tool set and trained the rest of the team, prototyped use of Python and Spark dataframes for Conformed layer testing on Databricks - allowing CSV and parquet files to be compared to the SQL Tables.

Testing build of a Azure cloud based DWH staging DB, taking patient narrative (notes) from Azure Cosmos DB in JSON format into a flattened relational Staging DB in Azure SQL Server. Validation of target database matched source data. Running via Azure functions / queues which could fail so also testing of the daily resync process to recover missed data.

Taking Payments & AR data from Sages various platform revenue streams payment systems into a single source of truth about who owes what. Sources a mix of Azure SQL, AWS S3. Target Snowflake.

Working for end client Reassure, (previously Windsor Life). Working alongside a tech build team who were replatforming the on premises dev and test environments into Azure Cloud. Acting a QA to verify build and release pipelines, logging defects, making changes to pipelines to correct issues. Highlight was creating a new test pipeline to trigger an environment & verify its correct deploy and tear down. Finally got around to learning Powershell, and Azure CLI to interrogate the Azure release status and wait until it had finished before kicking off the remove. Some very clever stuff going on that meant to provision a new VM, install red hat, oracle, delphix, fill it with a full anonymised copy of production data took about 3 to 4 hours instead of 3 months it took previously, allowing every developer and tester to have their own full size environment with delphix storing only the database deltas to keep space usages down.

Working on Apprenticeships service backend databases building an ODS. Initially testing data from internal APIs made it correctly to the operational data store. This was put on hold while the architectural approach was redesign to use ETL instead of API as it was too slow. I was then working on testing data feeds into the AS Data Mart verifying the quantity and quality of data. The ETL was a a mix of T-SQL , SSIS and later Azure Data Factory. I had a split role working 50/50 as tester / SQL developer writing views and stored procedures to persist more complex data that took too long to run in views. I also spent a few months working on public facing apprenticeships.gov.uk website doing feature testing and cross platform and accessibility testing with Browerstack and Sortsite to cover a team shortage.

New year, new job. Working on the Data & MI test team, so I'm a pig in muck. SQL Server, Oracle and a new one for me Netezza Datewarehouse. 1st project I'm test lead and is a big deletions project to comply with GDPR, checking the data deleted is correct operational systems still work, and then following through into DWH and checking historical versions of data are anonymised, but MI reports can still run and provide summary info. A big challenge was the PM left a week before we were due to seek permission from the board to do a trial run of deletions using a new test environment with a full copy of production data. I had to go and present instead. It got declined due to security issues, but myself and the new PM and spent 8 weeks putting in place access controls and monitoring similar to the production systems by working with all the platform and security teams to gain approval needed.

A business venture to allow people to experience the wow of fully immersive VR without having to shell out thousands on computer kit. Featuring 4 x HTC Vives, 2 X Oculus Rifts, and a green screen video studio.http://thevrhub.co.ukSadly trying to work a day job and run a hobby business didn't work out, but I learned more than a handful of lessons. Specifically on recruiting, marketing, networking (LANs and meetups) as well as having to specify, select and integrate the various systems we used... payments, VOIP phone system with IVR, online bookings, and a wordpress site and a video edit suite and built all the PCs with the help of an apprentice. If I could pick 1 key reason it didn't work... under estimating how hard filming with a green screen would be, which was part of the marketing plan, didn't work out and meant we didn't generate enough income for me to hire a manager so I could carry on with the day job. But no regrets, I lost less money than I would have had leasing a V8 petrol for a couple of years and had much more fun.

Back to E.ON again - energy is my favourite subject after all. This time a couple of projects. 1) Testing interfaces for Gas Registrations. REGE. The project was put back by the industry a year so I was redployed to 2) test some IVR and call recording solutions for Smart PAYG. Very interesting stuff and had a bit of fun putting on Accents to see if the IVR system, a solution from Convergys, can cope. Bizarelly in my normal voice it often thinks my midlands accent foiyve (5) is a four!?? . Following that 3) a new call recording solution from NICE Systems was being implemented. Lots of testing around making sure calls are compliant and not recording credit card details. After getting the testing done it became an implemenation job going around the sites trying to work out why it wasn't installed to all the PCs via SCCM. Following up with users and HP who run the managed service.4) CCP. Big customer contact platform programme to replace Aspect telephony with Genesis, and then replace all the NICE call recording by hooking into Genesys, and interface to the NICE IEX WFM with management suite.

Time for a bit of banking activity. iPSL process all the cheques from a large number of high street banks. Some interesting bits of kit... namely the cheque processing machines. Load a bunch of 100 for a test run and press the go button, by the time you turn your head they are down the track sitting in their sorted bins. I was testing a new web based front end for their users who work in clearing doing fraud detection, querying and so on. Much easier to use than the old system.

Was working on their CMS/Mediasuite product an acquisition from a company called NDS in 2012 who provide "head end digital TV services" to Sky BSB. Probably one of my most difficult assignments to date... started with an empty VM, installed oracle, 4 databases, Apache Tomcat and Active MQ then about 3 dozen applications. Took me nearly 2 months to get the environment built, configured and stable. The system recevies an http request containing meta data and file names, scans and encrypts the media files, adds all the meta data into a database and creates links between media so they can create pay per view or subscription packages such as "Ancient Warrior Movies" or "Indie Brit Flicks" and so on. A lot of unix work, with some SQL digging. Quite an impressive set up, but sadly it all came to an abrupt end when they decided to move the development to India.

Start back at work last year on my latest project. Getting E.On residential customers onto a new debt recovery system. Nice place to work - their brand new office in Nottingham City Centre. Have already written the test plan and so now it's on to writing lots of test cases and thousands of lines of SQL test code :-) This one is in Oracle so I'm a pig in muck. Went live no major headaches. Job done.

Taking a short career break to move into my new house and get everything as I want it. Beats the usual "take 3 years to get the decorating done just in time to move again". Things are going well so am now starting to look around for work again. Update.. Oh well - got a new job so back to work even though not all the house is done. To be honest - I had forgotten how quickly you can burn through cash when moving into a new place! Yikes!

Carrying out test planning, test preparation for data processing projects. Writing SQL test scripts to validate transformations of loaded data, carrying out verification of reports against cube data data using Excel. This is one of the jobs where I've done something that is visible publicly. Google "Apprenticeships National Success Rates tables" and you'll come across a bunch of Excel documents that are the published end results. They were very important to get 100% right - apparently can be a hot potato for the Minister of Education as they cover how well different local areas, ethnic groups and genders do after studying. Ie. whether they got a job, did further study ended up NEET (not in education employment or training) etc. Learned quite a lot on this role. For example how much we spend on subsidising basket weaving and flower arranging courses for people who have no intention of working in the industry.

Woking on DMI/Fabric project to transfer existing BBC Archive meta data (production notes, technical notes etc) onto a new integrated archive and production facility which links to the digitised media files. Writing automated test scripts using Oracle PL/SQL and Application Express. This role is a good example of not to believe what you read in the media. Yes the project cost £100 million, yes it was scrapped, but it wasn't all bad. The bit I worked actually went live and instead of using an antiquated 80 character per line DOS system they now have a portal based "google like" search facility for finding where their 7 million tapes and other artifacts are, and what is stored on them, in a proper normalised database rather than free text. What failed was trying to digitize several dozen Petabytes worth of archive material and make it downloadable to all employees.

Doing the data loads and failure investigations for National Health Service Patient Records Migration into Lorenzo healthcare. Very interesting and very large - actually huge project - circa 300 hospitals to migrate each with millions of records. The data migration team alone was 120+ people. Using Lorenzo's own migration tool (LDMS) plus SQL Server Manager to investigate job failures and identify missing records, foreign keys etc.

Data Warehouse & Corporate Reporting Tester / Lead. Carrying out a large migration from Legacy Systems onto a new hosted web platform. Loads of SQL checking of source to target systems. Ensuring all the money gets transferred on the Accounts systems for people/companies who have gone bankrput. Several hundred billion in assets and financial transactions. Over 100million financial transactions. Worked with head of finance to identify key metrics for a sucessful migration that were then turned into SQL queries on source and target systems.

Test analsyt/manager working alone on a consultancy basis to establish test strategy, approach, write scripts and execute and log defect. 1st 3 months working on a system integration test of a web based Pension Forecasting system incorporating new changes to the governments pension rules. 2nd 3 months Shared Workspace (eRooms) regression test, which had been experiencing performance problems.

Test Analyst: NFRs, Manual Testing of a web based technology refresh based on Java/Oracle backend. Data Migration Testing, Disaster Recovery Testing. Ministry Of Justice Courts systems (SUPS).

Working with a group of associates, qualified Domestic Energy Assesors, to lobby for the use of the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) to be extended for use as an advice tool. Seeking to establish changes to the underlying RdSAP method to allow inputs based on upgraded home energy reduction measures, instead of those that are assessed in the existing property, and to create a set of National occupation standards to train assessors in its use.

Data warehouse Test Team Leader (ICP Programme). After joining the team and finding out "testing" the DWH load meant running the jobs and seeing if they ran without error I asked the question "Do you check the data has loaded correctly". Err... no. Required a bit of change in test approach and skilling up the team in how to write cross database queries, data sampling and summary aggregations (sums on different groupings to reconcile loads). Think by the time I left it was actually "testing".

Deveoping utility billing, marketing and work management systems using Powerbuilder on Oracle/Tuxedo. Later moved to team leading and then automation test team lead using winrunner.

Developing screens, reports and integration jobs for a new sales order processing, warehouse management and stock control system.