Karen D. Ford

2334 Caribou Lane

Grafton, WI 53024

262-375-2506

karen.d.ford@hotmail.com

 

CAREER SUMMARY

Versatile software engineering professional with in-depth experience in the entire software product lifecycle, across multiple industries, platforms and development environments.   Strong leadership and management skills as well as technical expertise in infrastructure, requirements specifications, analysis and design, development, testing, field support and customer training.

 

TECHNICAL PROFILE

Programming Languages:  C, ksh, awk and Perl scripting, C++, Java (emerging)

Operating Systems:  UNIX, Linux, Solaris, VXWorks, VRTX, pSOS

Development Tools:  Configuration management (ClearCase, CVS, RCS, SCCS, PVCS), debuggers and emulators, Purify, GUI utilities, InstallShield, Test Director (emerging)

Technologies:  Multithreading, Sockets and RPC’s, TCP/IP, File system development, device drivers

 

EXPERIENCE

Management

  • Recruited and supervised a group of five engineers conducting  support of software for existing customers.  Retained customers and increased revenue by responding promptly and accurately.
  • Prioritized customer issues by projected timetables,  customer impact, and relevance to the system as a whole.
  • Supervised a group of three engineers testing software for a data storage device.
  • Technical team leader and mentor for a group of eight engineers developing telecommunications test equipment.

Computer and Data Processing Skills

  • Twenty years of experience with software development in UNIX and embedded systems, object-oriented analysis and design, coding, and testing of computer systems.
  • Customer-specific development led to several significant product sales.

Communication

  • Prepared  and presented customer training for products at two companies.
  • Developed technical documentation for several products, both at the developer level and at the customer level.
  • Worked with customers to define requirements for a billing system.  Trained customers and technical writers on its use.
  • Worked to build teams with people from many cultural backgrounds.
  • Speak and read French

Finance

  • Owned and managed Karen D. Ford and Associates, Ltd., a corporation providing software consulting services from  1991 to 2003.
  • Perform bookkeeping, budgeting and payroll for the above business.

 

EMPLOYMENT HISTORY

Baxter Healthcare, Transfusion Therapies Division, Round Lake, IL                                                                                                                     2006

Designer and manufacturer of blood separation equipment for use in blood banks

Consultant, Quality Engineering

  • Reviewed and drove updates for process documentation, requirements specifications, validation and verification test plans, risk management documents.  Verified technical accuracy, consistency between documents and conformance to FDA regulations and internal processes.
  • Worked with development and systems engineers to streamline processes while still ensuring that requirements were satisfied and conformance to regulatory standards was maintained.
  • Served on Software Change Control Board to evaluate priority and feasibility of proposed software changes.
  • Served on a cross-functional team managing the transition from manual requirements management to the DOORS tool.
  • Served on project “core team” , which tracks progress on milestones and deliverables in order to identify and assess risks to the project plan.

Northwestern Mutual Financial Network, Milwaukee, WI                                                                                                                                        2006

Provider of life insurance and financial planning resources

IT Consultant

  • Streamlined build process by automating several procedures using ant and shell scripting
  • Set up a configuration management model to provide secure limited access for offshore developers while providing full capabilities to those in the home office.
  • Reduced project delays and system downtime by finding workarounds for unavailable systems.

Agfa Healthcare Informatics, Hartland, WI                                                                                                                                                                  2005

Manufacturer of digital image archive, retrieval, and networking products for hospitals

Software Configuration Specialist

Served as internal consultant to support software development and configuration management.  Created tools for automated builds and product releases.  Member of cross-functional technical team, mentored and trained junior engineers.

  • Streamlined product build process from several hours to an hour and a half.  Automated weekly builds using ant and cruisecontrol.
  • Deployed new automated configuration management and build system to better ensure reproducibility of software versions. Recognized design flaws in the original package, and ensured that productivity would continue during transition by working with system administrators to resolve problems before deployment.
  • Reduced unexpected project delays by implementing a process for maintenance of software common to several projects

 

GE Healthcare Information Technologies, Milwaukee, WI                                                                                                                             2003-2005

Leading manufacturer of sophisicated medical diagnostic and imaging equipment

IT Consultant

Technical lead for 7-engineer project team for initial software testing of patient monitoring devices.  Liaison with developers with developers to identify and resolve defects.

  • Recipient of an excellence award for creating a product-specific gcc, g++, binutils and glibc distribution.
  •  Performed configuration management for a team of 60 engineers and a code base of approximately 7000 files using CVS and ClearCase.  Maintained server pool and tools as needed by developers.
  • Researched code coverage and Java performance tools, and determined that open-source products would meet our needs, saving licensing fees.
  • Automated nightly builds and unit testing.  Used apache ant, cruisecontrol and and shell scripting.

 

 

Karen D. Ford and Associates, Glenview, IL                                                                                                                                                       1991-2003

Software development consulting firm

Consultant specializing in UNIX, embedded realtime software and quality assurance for the telecommunications, healthcare, and IT industries.  Notable projects include:

  • Acted as integration lead for Linux-base PSDN (wireless data) product.  Created testing framework to aid in regression testing prior to QA code drops.  Worked toward merging common code into cross-product libraries in order to facilitate maintenance.  Enhanced development and integration testing tools.  Used C and Linux.  Added firewall and copy protection features on PSDN.  Resolved memory usage and multithreading bugs in GRE/RP/PPP interfaces.  Added signal handling enhancements.
  • Provided technical leadership, software design and development for five-engineer team developing UMTS "Node B Tester" (RNC simulator) for third-generation wireless technology.  Implemented "NAS" protocol layer.  Led  integration effort and was the group's real-time debugging expert.  Used C++, VxWorks and Tornado.
  • Worked with customers and sales to define requirements for billing information, and implemented these requirements. Trained tech writers and instructors on the billing information.
  • Recruited and managed a software group to address customer support issues. Prioritized customer issues by projected timetables, customer impact, and relevance to the system as a whole. Responded quickly and accurately in order to insure continued customer revenue. Planned and supervised the implementation of performance improvements in the product, prioritizing those needed by existing customers.
  • Rewrote flow control algorithm for existing Telecommunications Management Network product because messages were being lost due to socket buffer overflows during peak traffic intervals.  Detected and fixed several race conditions between the client and server, primarily in the area of multithreaded database access. Used C++ under Solaris.
  • Enhanced graphical user interface for new features as requested by customer. Designed and implemented user interface screens resulting in improved usability and system security. Fixed numerous problems related to asynchronous data transfers and timeout handling. Used ILOG and C++.
  • Designed and implemented a device-independent reentrant file system including device driver on PCMCIA flash memory for pSOS-based blood platelet separator.  Target used dual 68030; development environment was ANSI C, using HP emulators.
  • Provided maintenance and support, improved scalability, performance enhancements (including a threefold increase in throughput), a detailed test plan and customer training for a Communications Integrator product which provides OSI session, network, and transport protocol layers between numerous hardware and software platforms. Received two employee awards from customer for contributions that led to significant product sales. Used C++ and SunOS, including shared memory and semaphores.
  • Contributed to specification and design of a filesystem to transparently migrate files between disk and secondary storage. Product included UNIX applications and kernel modifications. Performed system integration, testing and debugging of engineering releases. Designed, implemented, and documented automated acceptance test suite for the product. Included functional, endurance, stress, and performance measurement. Led test team during test execution and regression test development. Development and target environment was SunOS, used dbx, purify, C, AWK, ksh and tcl/expect scripts.

From 1982 to 1991, held senior technical positions in telecommunications, industrial automation, medical and nuclear power firms. Details of pre-1991 and consulting experience available upon request.


EDUCATION AND TRAINING

Completed coursework in Java, Test Director, Finance, Accounting, Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, Theory of Interest and Mathematical statistics (2002-2005). Preparation for Project Management Professional and Certified Software Quality Engineer in process (2006).

 

Iowa State University, Ames, IA

Master of Science in Nuclear Engineering, 1982.  Thesis involved fault-tree based probabilistic risk assessment.

Bachelor of Arts in French, 1982

Bachelor of Science in Nuclear Engineering, 1980