IN A NUTSHELL

I’m Fred Beringer, your host on this blog. I’ve started to write in April 2009 and hope I’ll be able to share some of my experiences in Software development, Software testing, productivity and life !!

I’m currently Vice President Business Development Europe for SOASTA. I’ve joined them in December 2010 to help them develop their fantastic business in Europe. You can read why I’ve chosen to join them here. 

You can find additional details on my professional career on my LinkedIn profile.

THE STORY SO FAR

Born in France, I grew up in Nice on the sunny French Riviera. I’ve started some programming on Apple IIe back in the 80′s. I’ve started to get serious about programing in 1989 when I spent one year in Olympia, Washington states at Saint Martin College. When I got back in 1990 I joined Nice University to end up in 1998 with a Masters in Computer Science. Some of my most interesting projects were around voice over IP (way before Skype ! ), Visioconference and Java application on Smartcard for financial institutions (in collaboration with Sun Microsystems.) At the end of my Masters, a mandatory 6 months internship got me traveling to San Jose, California at IBM. I was single and was going for 6 months. I came back in France after 8 years, married with 3 kids. And lots of good memories !

IBM YEARS

I started for 6 months as part of the IMS team and wrote a middleware to integrate IMS with Windows COM objects. This was quite an interesting (and challenging) especially since back in 1998, there was not that much information about COM/DCOM. At the end of the internship, as I was ready to head back to France, I got noticed by a development manager building a fresh new team for an upcoming product formerly known as Net.Commerce (renamed Websphere Commerce Suite after some rebranding). I accepted without second thought and became part of the global WebSphere team. I keep excellent memories of these 3 years: long night of C++ coding on AIX, 390 Unix Services, zLinux (SUSE) and lots of customer pressure (RJR, Ericson, Morgan Stanley etc.). The environment was quite agile at the time (without getting as far as SCRUM or XP) without dedicated Software testing team. As the capacity reached its peak it was clear that some dedicated testing team had to be formalized. I ended up with the lead quite naturally as I was already involved in creating some automatic test framework and performance tools.

I joined  the Information Integration (II) team in 2002 to work as part of the DB2 Replication team as release manager. I picked up some invaluable skills in project management, leadership and overall management experience which lead me to get my first line management role in 2003 when I became Software Test Manager for the DB2 Replication team. My team was very technical with a strong emphasis on automation and performance testing. I picked up additional product responsibility in 2005 as part of the XAccess and Ascential Software merger. The team grew to over 20 members in 3 locations.

As an expatriate, there is always a part of you which wants to go back to your native country. Timing, location and the scope of the experience came all together in April 2006 when I was approached by Experian in Monaco to build and lead their Global Software testing team. I striked a deal fairly quickly and joined Experian in June 2006.

These 8 years in California are the foundation of my professional career. I had the opportunity to join some Internet startups especially in 1998-2001 but I’m glad I’ve sticked with IBM as they brought me some strong principles which I’m able to apply to my every day work life. Maybe I would have been very successful in a startup environment but the fact is that all of my potential candidate folded during the Internet bubble

EXPERIAN DECISION ANALYTICS

Experian Decision Analytics allowed me to take my career to the next level with global responsibility for its entire portfolio. Technically, it spans from C++, .NET, Java, J2EE and Cobol ! It covers all the type of testing you can imagine (low level, functional, integration, performance and benchmark etc.) The business aspects were entirely new to me: Origination, loan processing, customer management, collection, fraud, scoring etc. During these very interesting (and challenging) economic time it fit perfectly and forces you to absorb the business knowledge very quickly.

My whole testing strategy was fairly straight forward:

• Automation, automation, automation !
• Get the most technical people you can get in order to help you build home grown frameworks, tackle tough performance challenges (most Experian softwares deal with terrabyte of data. Performance requirement is high on the list) and bridge the possible technical gap with development team.
• Influence quality from requirement to support.
• Give broad visibility on the quality of the software. Avoid surprises.
• People come first. Make your people happy, challenged, keep them growing. They will reward you with invaluable commitment.

Additionally to testing, I’d picked up responsibility for some of the required software documentation we ship with our software. I currently have a growing team of technical writers who help me increase the overall quality of our products.

I’m currently leading a worldwide 100+ employee organization across multiple geography: UK, Monaco, Sofia and Kuala Lumpur.

ABOUT THIS BLOG

This is your typical WordPress blog hosted on my own domain. I’ve got quite extensive experience in bloging (mostly for personal usage) so this was easy to setup. The main challenge is to find personal free time to write the article ! It is also an opportunity for me to learn a bit more about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as this is an area which always intrigued me.

This is a personal blog, and the opinions expressed here are NOT those of my employer.