London Ambulance Service

The London Ambulance Service (LAS) is the UK’s busiest ambulance service serving over 7 million people who live and work in the London area. During my time at the LAS I was responsible for defining and setting up the organizational test policy. This included the creation and board level approval of the test and acceptance strategy, the specification and installation of the purpose built test environment, the evaluation and implementation of the test tools and the recruitment, training and management of a team of 10 test analysts. I have also managed the full functional and non-functional testing of three major concurrent projects including: CTAK, the services legacy Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system and the replacement CAD system (CommandPoint^TM).

CommandPoint^TM

• CommandPoint^TM is a COTS CAD system developed by Northrop Grumman for use by all emergency services. Prior to the selection of a suitable supplier, I evaluated the test solutions proposed by each of the potential suppliers. I then developed and implemented the overarching Test and Acceptance Strategy. Having reviewed the suppliers’ internal system test procedures and results I led a team of 5 testers and subject matter experts to review, witness and document the Factory Acceptance Testing (FAT) and the System Performance Testing (SPT), of the new systems functionality and performance at the suppliers premises in Chantilly, Virginia. Following 4 iterations of FAT I managed the Site Integration Testing (SIT) of the system to validate the external systems interfaces against simulators and eventually live interfaces. Upon completion of the SIT, I developed and managed the full User Acceptance Testing (UAT) process. I was also involved with an additional System Performance Test phase conducted on site using purpose built simulators and scripts to capture and play back live data into the system at increased speeds to measure the CPU usage, disk and memory utilisation of the middle-tier and back-end servers to stress them at contractual loads and beyond. Following completion of all test phases my final test report was used by the trust board to aid the final go/no go decision and the subsequent successful deployment of the services biggest and most complex IT system.

CTaK

• CTAK (Call Taking System) system is a legacy bespoke system running on UNIX with an Informix database backend. The CTAK Enhancement project extended the life of the CTAK system by including many additional features required by the users and additional functionality with the specific aim of reducing ambulance response times from receiving the call to arriving on scene. I wrote and implemented a test strategy to validate a series of planned releases of the system and then managed the test and release of those updates.