Guest post by Airship
Birmingham is such a beautiful city. It’s a place for foodies, craft beer connoisseurs, music fanatics, and, of course, outdoor enthusiasts. Unlike the amazing restaurants, music venues, and breweries, our green spaces depend on charitable contributions to keep their operations going.
From IT professionals to UX designers, TechBirmingham thrives through its immensely talented and diverse group of member companies. Meet the Board is an ongoing Q&A series highlighting this group of movers, shakers and makers in Bham’s tech industry.
Meet David Powell, VP of Managed and Cloud Services at TekLinks, a nationally-recognized IT solutions company. A Birmingham native, David has been working at TekLinks for six years. Read on to get to know more about one of our newest board members.
Hey David! Let’s get started — Tell us more about your job.
I have the best “dinner party conversation killing” job title ever. No one ever knows how to follow up. I’ll get things like “like iCloud?” And, while people at a dinner party may not understand, I have a great job. I’ve got the marketing department, product strategy, product roadmap, and industry thought-leadership. While I lead our marketing team, we have some great people on that team that make it all happen. As for the other areas, my job is to keep my eyes “downfield”. I’m to look at industry trends, product trends, customer requests, and competitive offerings and make sure that TekLinks is well positioned in the market. Periodically, I get to travel around the country and speak about the cloud. I love the fact that from California to Boston, they bring in a guy from good ole Birmingham to address the group about the cloud!
What do you think is the biggest misconception about your field?
I heard it said that “technology has gotten so good that it has taken the technology out of technology.” This is pretty true. People think that I’m some kind of “techie”. When, really, technology now isn’t so much about the “how”, but about the “what”. It isn’t as important to know how something works as much as it is to know what you use the technology for.
What are some of your hobbies outside of work?
I love live music and I love to read. So, when I’m not working, I love to go to a concert or pick up a great book. Even though I work in the tech industry, I still buy hardback books. I love the social component of concerts and books, so I like to have a hardcopy book to share and pass along. As it relates to music, if you want to know what I’m listening to, find me on Spotify and subscribe to some of my playlists. Besides those two hobbies, I’m the proud dad of two awesome kids and I’m very involved in their lives coaching sports, etc.
And shoutout to my lovely wife, Allison. She is pretty awesome (even if she does lack solid judgment with regards to guys, a flaw from which I greatly benefit)!
How do you feel about Bham’s tech scene?
Birmingham was a little late to the game, but as is the case with many things, slow and steady tends to win the race. If we can continue to highlight our successes and grow our tech focused businesses locally, we will be fine. Just like you see so many companies on the west coast that are started by people that worked at Microsoft or Google, I hope to be able to see lots of companies in Birmingham in the next decade that are founded by people that used to work for TekLinks or Daxko or whomever. That’s the way you really grow the market.
Well said! And if we want to learn more, where can we find your company online?
Visit TekLinks online here, or check us out on YouTube and Twitter.
Want to hear more from David? Follow him online: Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, LinkedIn.
Written By Geoffrey Rodgers, Manager, Software Quality Assurance, Atlas RFID Solutions
As a software quality assurance specialist for the last 12 years, I have seen test case management done about the same way in each of the companies where I either worked or consulted for. Most medium-to-large organizations use a system specifically designed for test case management, so it seems that would be the ideal solution. However, I have noticed time and time again that so much of the effort that goes into creating test cases is wasted on inefficient processes and duplicated information. In many cases, by the end of the project, the majority of the test cases have become obsolete due to changing requirements and code.
The intent, I believe, for most documentation on a project is that it is ‘living’ – meaning, constantly updated and accurate for its purpose. The reality is that it takes time to write documentation, and it is one of the first things to get dropped when it comes time to push harder and faster and get the software released. In an effort to overcome the temptation of ignoring documentation altogether, I set out to find a new solution for test case management. What I came up with was something that we were already using for other purposes: a wiki.
Using a wiki for test case documentation is not as simple as moving all of your existing test cases into a new tool. The key to making the most of a wiki solution is to transform the information found in system requirements and test case documents into a full-fledged knowledge base for the entire system. That knowledge base then provides all of the necessary details, making test case creation more efficient and accurate. The knowledge base can even be reused to provide detailed information for user guides and technical support teams. Effectively, the same principles used to make the software itself more manageable can be used to make documentation more manageable and accurate.
For more information on how this solution is implemented, be sure to join me on August 19th for the next TechTuesday meeting, hosted by TechBirmingham and sponsored by Alabama Power.
Register to attend HERE
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Birmingham, AL 35203
205.918.7515
info@techbirmingham.com
Join the tech talk.
