Name: Larry Y Job Title: Solution Test Specialist Business Area: Software Group Location: Hursley, UK Joined IBM: 2001
What do you enjoy most about the working environment at IBM?
Firstly, it's an environment that encourages people to develop as individuals and professionals. IBM is always happy to send you on certification courses and any kind of education you need. I also learn a lot from the people I work with. I have access to Master Inventors, the people responsible for many of the patents that are core to our technology today. Secondly, IBM is a market leader making a genuine impact on technology and industry. Having a hand in those kind of changes is really exciting.
How would you describe a Solution Tester's role?
I work in the Software Development Lab at Hursley. We develop customer-like solutions from representative scenarios with an aim to finding integration problems. A few years back the dot com boom happened and more people increased their use of IT systems. This brought with it lots of integration problems when the different systems had to work together. Solution Testers expose any of these issues and solve them through testing different technologies on multiple platforms, and also considering the effects of third party software on IBM based solutions. We take customer scenarios, then we build and test a system based on their needs to expose any problems. We really stress the systems and feed back any issues to the development team. We also produce different types of collateral to help customers achieve what they need to do faster.
