Paul Houlihan has been studying for several years how to remove defects cost-effectively from code, especially for distributed algorithms. For the past 5 years, Paul has worked at Mangosoft Incorporated as a principal engineer in the QA group. Mangosoft specializes in peer-to-peer software running in kernel as well as user mode. Mangosoft's has two premier products. The first is CacheLink, which is a LAN based web accelerator that caches web pages and makes them available to other users on the LAN. The other is Mangomind, a shared Internet drive that appears as a local drive on your Windows desktop. With extensive caching for good performance, Mangomind makes collaboration over the Internet as simple as accessing a local drive. While it has been a challenge to automate the testing of these diverse and complicated products,very high quality is essential for distributed products, indeed, it is a key differentiator. Paul has contributed to the extensive test automation infrastructure that in one year alone ran 56,000 tests in Mangosoft's automated unattended 24-by-7 lab, filing 3686 problem reports. Prior to that Paul was a principal engineer in the OpenVMS cluster group. Layered on the OpenVMS operating system, VMSClusters are a distributed work environment spread over up to 96 computers, spanning multiple interconnects and computer and disk architectures.
