Dr Steven Butler
Senior ConsultantSteven received a PhD in the area of formal specification and reasoning about object oriented software systems. Upon completing his PhD in August 1998, Steven has worked for K. J. Ross & Associates Pty Ltd specialising in Test Strategy and Risk Analysis, Test Environments, Test Automation and Load and Performance Testing.
Steven’s skills have seen him work for clients in both the Government and Private Sectors including:
Government
Queensland Department of Education, Training and the Arts: Steven co-developed the overall testing strategy for a state-wide school-reporting application. Steven also advised on Test Environment requirements, led the Load & Performance testing of the application and has used K. J. Ross & Associates’ own Automation Framework and SQL Scripting to automate data preparation tasks through both the user interface (to ensure adherence to business rules) and the database backend. The application uses Microsoft ASP.Net on load balanced Windows 2003 Servers with a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 cluster as the database backend.
Queensland Health: Steven has facilitated and participated in Risk Assessment workshops for several Queensland Health projects. He has also provided consultancy for a large test environment infrastructure upgrade project for Queensland Health’s internal Test Facility. Steven also architected and co-developed a keyword driven test automation framework that allows Queensland Health to combine multiple automation technologies into the same business oriented test scripts.
Gold Coast City Council: Steven used Compuware QA Load and Microsoft Visual C++ to load test a major upgrade to the Council’s document management system using a COM API. Steven also used Compuware’s Application Vantage to analyse the network traffic caused by similar actions in the old and new version of the Document Management System.
Queensland Department of Treasury (QSuper): Steven defined and oversaw implementation of a test automation framework for regression testing QSuper’s core application. The application was hosted on an IBM AS400 Server, with a Java/Windows based User interface.
Private
Telstra: Steven led a small team to plan, implement and execute load tests on a major upgrade to Telstra’s nationwide planning and appointment scheduling application. The application was hosted on Windows Server 2003 application servers with an Oracle database on Sun hardware. The Load Test simulated activity from many sources including mobile devices, thick clients, web clients and message queues for appointments generated in external systems.
Westinghouse Rail Systems Australia: Steven has helped Westinghouse improve testing efficiency by porting an Automatic Train Protection Application and a test simulation environment to run on commodity Windows based PCs.
Zurich: Steven used the IBM Rational Load Testing tool to load test Zurich’s insurance broking application. The application was web delivered and hosted on Windows Server 2003 application servers.
Foxboro Transportation: Steven was responsible for leading the Software Integration Testing of the Hong Kong Mass Transit Rail Power Remote Control and Environmental Control System.
Steven can be contacted via email at steven.butler@kjross.com.au
