Making test documentation easier to manage.
Dramatically improved the ease of managing test documentation at Lear Corporation by taking the unprompted initiative to develop an application for technicians, test engineers, and validation engineers to easily track and work on test documents, files, and reports.
When I started working at Lear Corporation as a Test Engineer, the first thing I had to learn was a folder structure on a shared drive. This folder structure, as it turned out, was the main mechanism via which testing happened.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this made it hard to keep track of all the testing that was currently requested, had work instructions prepared and queued to test, were in process, completed, or waiting for test reports to be written or approved. Tests naturally would get overlooked or missed steps of the documentation process because finding out if things were going correctly involved digging through several directories on the shared drive.
After a couple months, I was sick of the digging, and so I decided to do something about this clear user experience problem for the test engineers in the lab. I spent some extra time writing a C# application that could find all the tests currently in process, regardless of if they had missed steps or not, and list them in an easy-to-parse chart, showing how far they were along the documentation process and if steps had been missed with color coding. I added direct links to the underlying test files and folders through left and right click respectively on the cells, and with that done, I had made the “Test Progress Monitor” in a week.
Very quickly after showing the application to other test engineers, test technicians, and validation engineers, several wanted to try it out! Those that did were impressed, and immediately integrated it into their workflows. I constantly solicited feedback from all of my users, and over my subsequent time at Lear, added optimizations and more features to simplify and automate common parts of the test documentation process.
After about a year of progress on the Test Progress Monitor - “TPM” for short - lab leadership requested that I host formal training sessions on using it for all of the lab personnel. After these sessions, the whole lab building was, and still is, using my software to get testing done.