Work Experience
Tom's role as Tech Lead and Scrum Master involved the day-to-day running
of all 3 development teams (10 to 12 people per team), planning releases,
and running of all sprint events (estimation, sprint planning, stand-ups,
retrospectives), as well as setup and reporting of Jira workflows, dashboards
kanbans and filters. This project delivered a critical benefit to Hospital
Emergency departments helping them to manage their capacity in order to
allieviate winter pressures and manage waiting times during the Covid-19
pandemic. The project was delivered to incredibly challenging timescales,
moving from establishing a team in Sprint 0 to MVP release in 3 months.
Key to Tom's role was coordinating the teams, ensuring the technical
quality and prioritising necessary changes for the initial release.
Tom's role is as a technical team lead and Scrum Master for an end-to-end
development team of 10 to 12 people including a Business Analyst, Developers
(Java, Javascript (AngularJS), PHP, PostgreSQL), Functional
Testers and Automation Engineers. Tom's day-to-day activities include
running of daily stand-ups, sprint planning, code reviews and retrospectives.
He is responsible for sprint delivery and code quality as well as longer
term objectives including knowledge sharing, documentation and upskilling
of the team.
Tom has been involved in this project since the bid preparation phase,
through initial developmet, go-live and ongoing feature development and
maintenance. Tom's role began with a 2-week on-site pre-elaboration
phase focussed on examination of the existing legacy application's
proprietary codebase, code metrics and functional analysis. Tom worked
closely with Technical Architects, Business Analysts and Subject Matter
Experts leading to requirements gathering and he then conducted investigations
and comparisons of candidate technologies for the bid. Following the pre-elaboration,
Tom was then heavily involved in producing the proposal document that formed
the basis of the succesful bid. Following a successful bid, Tom was fundamental
to the Sprint Zero and Elaboration activities, setting up Git repositores,
CI build servers, project structure and the reference architecture. This
role required close teamwork with the Principal and Technical Architects
to refine, agree and document the project's code structure and key
design patterns around separation of tiers, REST APIs, database transactions
& audit, module structure and coding standards. Tom then lead one of
three development teams during the project's 18-month development to
initial go-live.
Tom joined this project as a software engineer during its final phase
to assist with completing the functional development and bug fixing in
preparation for a parallel run prior to go-live, where the new application
was trialed alongside the existing legacy application. The role required
Tom to familiarise himself with the existing codebase and a large number
of integration points with other work-streams and APIs in order to contribute
productively to project. Key challenges included working as part of a large
team spread over multiple locations and a number of different suppliers,
often with poorly defined changing requirements and complex domain knowledge
around commodities trading and invoicing.
Responsible for the delivery of software components that receive events
from other work streams to trigger the generation of cost items for Interest, Warehouse Rent, Transportation and Valuations.
Costs are displayed to traders as a key tool to manage profit/loss. The
application is a large scale distributed system using a broad mix of technologies
including Scala, Ruby and C#. Tom’s main development role
focused on Scala and he adapted quickly to a new programming language,
demonstrating an ability to 'hit the ground running' and make a
valuable contribution to functionality, unit and component testing.
Lead developer on BT.com eCommerce platform; Projects include the development
of the Google powered search results page (using XML/XSLT and
Zeus traffic manager) for BT Internet users, which receives over 1 million
hits per day and generates significant advertising revenue; Strong emphasis
on performance and stability. Key member of team working on complete redesign
of the retail consumer MyAccount homepage and successfully delivered a
new online order tracking application resulting in 30% improvement in successfully
tracked orders, and 1000 fewer helpdesk calls per week. Leading a small
on-shore development team as an exemplar of how a test driven, agile development
methodology, coupled with experienced, skilled developers, can result in
better quality deliveries.
Lead developer for the BT.com Beta platform. Role involved design assurance,
review and sign-off of designs and test plans, and technical leadership
of development team. Striving to introduce an element of innovation into
BT's online presence by launching new self-service applications in
“beta” format. Applications that graduate from Beta status are migrated
to the mainstream BT.com platform. Unsuccessful applications are quickly
identified and reworked or “fail fast” thereby minimising wasted development
expense. Tom led a small team of 3 developers to create a personalised
homepage framework based around the open source Apache Shindig project
for use as a custom portal for the top 15 BT Wholesale customers.
J2EE developer on BT.com Beta. Focusing on innovative new applications
heavily influenced by emerging Web2.0 technologies and following Agile
Delivery work practices. Responsibilities included rapid turnaround of
prototypes, proof-of-concepts, high-level design, implementation, and close
collaboration with Business Improvement managers to identify and capture
the requirements that solve business problems. Other responsibilities include
facilitator of Agile Scrum sessions, running daily stand-up meetings and
weekly checkpoints. Particular focus on developing new applications around: Google Maps; Ajax,
Widgets/Gadgets (iGoogle); 3rd party data APIs (ReST, XML, JSON)
and Javascript frameworks (jQuery, prototype, scriptaculous).
Rewriting key consumer web applications for new WebLogic Portal platform.
Release 1: worked on Access Control, focussing on Login & Registration.
Responsible for implementation of key components of the website security.
Release 2: Worked on Products & Services webapp, responsible
for implementation of key back-end EJB components.
Joined BT, working on Webtrack, a web based fleet management and
tracking application using GPS positioning and Inmarsat satellite/SMS messaging.
Writing comms applications and developing for mobile devices (Windows CE).
Responsible for creating a mobile application that was successfully trialled
within BTPayphones. Developed mobile consumer applications based around
SMS, personalisation and location, and resulting in an application prototype
that was delivered into the BT Brightstar incuband Rocking Frog for commercial
exploitation outside of BT. Performed customer contact role to Internal
Ventures customer. Also supported external proposition development.
