SOAP

New Admin Dashboard - Architected and implemented green field admin dashboard, worked with junior devs and leadership to bring about in the requested stack: Bootstrap / JQuery / Ruby / Java / MySQL / LDAP. Users used Admin Dashboard to administer Organization, Role, and other management aspects of the Explorys EPM Suite.

Dependency Injection Framework - To enable high testability, all components required dependencies to be passed in, and so eliminating factory boilerplate without adopting a complex DI system was desirable. Wrote and shared a simple runtime-reflection based DI framework with multiple projects / teams

Having shown in Quoting (F3) and REF 2.0 (UI Framework) that tests and low complexity policies led to fewer bugs and higher velocity by doing some a/b studies, the business invested in tooling to automatically measure and enforce policies across the Direct Quoting line of business software development teams.

These teams used a variety of software stacks and technologies, including proprietary build and release systems.

I consulted with the build and release team, at the time, a separate team, to understand their plugin architecture which already was in use for all said teams.

Next, I worked with each team to understand their level of code coverage across different types of tests (unit, integration, end to end), and agree with them what targets they wanted to meet, and at what point in time.

Some teams required me to implement coverage measurement tools. Keep in mind that we were not able to use open source tech, and actionscript had no unit testing or code coverage tools.

I worked with a mentor of mine to write a lexer-parser-generator, which took the grammar for the actionscript language and allowed us to instrument our codebase with a pre-build step that inserted beacon calls with metadata into the various methods of the application. The coverage monitor and unit test UI was written in C#.

I exposed the coverage reporting service using web services running on SOAP via MS ASP.net WCF communications stack. Initially an MS SQL database housed the data, but as it grew, we moved it to a data cube where various dimensional summary and BI queries could be more efficiently run without interfering with the transactional nature of concurrent builds reporting their metrics in across the business.

Built upon existing code analysis and instrumentation tools to create a cross-platform solution for the build-time analysis of unit and system test code coverage, cyclomatic complexity, code coupling, defect density, change volume, maintainability, and other quality metrics. Data from many different proprietary formats is transformed into a single canonical format, where it is in turn normalized into a relational structure to facilitate on demand querying for system-level quality benchmarking, real-time code quality reporting, providing objective insight into QA risk assessments / test strategies, and enforcement of architectural standards and constraints.

Progressive had two sites for Direct Auto Quoting - one used by customers at home and the other used by our call-center reps. Given the complex state-by-state variance in the insurance laws, this made for a huge maintenance cost, and doing it twice in two codebases didn't make sense.

The premise was that a single web 2.0 Direct Quoting Application could replace these while also yielding a much more modern and customer-delighting application.

As the team's Actionscript expert, I joined and quickly helped out delivering feature after feature, and I loved the XP discipline and grew to appreciate TDD especially after the site started hitting performance problems that warranted significant refactors, which would have been much riskier without test coverage!

Our pilot included 14 of the 50 states, and was a complete success. However, the amount of clientside rules and assets started slowing the app down, and this was when I was asked to replace the REF framework that preceded my joining, with something much faster and more developer friendly. This led to my promotion to lead engineer, where I begun work on REF 2.0 (UI Framework)

Cancels was Progressive's first attempt at enabling policy cancellation without making a call to the call center and talking to a human.

The business wanted to find out key information that would aid them in avoiding cancellations in the future, as well as to provide off-ramps to cancellation that users might find enticing.

I worked with the business to understand the requirements, which allowed the user to navigate back and forth, answering questions that implicated which other questions were relevant, including questions in the future flows that the user may have already navigated through.

The UI was accordion-like, with eased animations, lighting, visual progress indicators and complex business logic that varied due to state-level regulation variance in the insurance industry.

I completed the application and it was delivered to production where we got a higher rate of cancellation data for scientists than we were capturing in our call centers. This helped us better understand the motivators for cancellation.

The success on this project is what got me brought in to help lead a much more significant effort - a brand new auto insurance policy quoting system for all 50 states - as a full-time employee