James E. Hanlon has over 25 years of wide-scope industrial experience in voice and data communications control, and associated management and reporting systems. He is experienced in applying a broad range of formal and rigorous techniques to the development and verification of complex hardware-software systems.
He uses a distinct problem solving style: Analyze-Systematize-Formalize-Automate, one demonstrably more flexible and productive than alternatives that appeal to arbitrary development "phases", or implementation "orientations". He has used this approach in academic, industrial, and commercial environments on wide range of problems, including communication protocol design, user/device interaction, hardware board-level communication, redundant resource management, business rules in financial applications. The activities and work products associated with testing thereby become tightly coupled with their more traditionally regarded design counterparts-both are, at any time, building off of the same base of formally and informally stated aspects of the application.
Recent accomplishments include:
- Developed formal ruleset model of a derivative securities trading application. Used to identify requirements anomalies and to generate expected results for testing.
- Developed a library of glue routines-in perl, NT cmd, SQL, Unix shell-that controlled and reported on the results of automated testing of a distributed financial application.
- Defined IP address space allocation plan for cellular data packet network for a Baby Bell.
- Developed the test automation system for a development environment comprised of Silicon Graphics/IRIX, Cray/Unicos, and Sun/Solaris servers with NT/WinTel clients. This environment supported supercomputing simulation and scientific visualization applications implemented in C++ with proprietary middleware. Test tools included Rational/Rose, T/STP, Cantata, and QA/Partner. Developed Perl scripts to implement tool/tool interfaces, prepared html documentation, and performed Clearcase configuration.
- Developed the Tootsie test automation system for a Solaris/Wintel target environment supporting a real-time financial trading system implemented using C++, Orbix/Isis, and Sybase. Test tools included DOORS, T/STP, Cantata, QA/Partner.
Hanlon has special expertise in:
- Test engineering for real-time telephony systems including automatic test case generation from specifications; management of test result database, report production, and metrics capture and analysis.
- Object-oriented analysis in-the-large: applications with 100s of subsystems, 100s of modules per subsystem, dozens of versions per module.
- Capacity and performance planning for local and wide-area networks, bottleneck identification, and hardware/software reconfiguration.
Hanlon is a Registered Professional Engineer of Illinois, a member of the IEEE and the IEEE Technical Committee on Software Engineering.
He holds the M.S.C.S. in Computer Communications from DePaul University and the B.S.E.E. in Electronics and Communications from Michigan State University.