Peter 'Cato' Sellars

Peter Sellars is a Senior Software Engineer at Solnet Solutions Ltd based in Auckland, New Zealand. As well as being a Senior Software Engineer he is also an Agile practitioner, a Kanban fan & is fanatical about quality.

He has over 10 years commercial IT experience incorporating a variety of project roles. He has worked on projects for the payment processing, media, entertainment, automobile, logistics, telecommunications, banking and insurance industries.

His commercial training begun at Dartington ITec, Devon, UK in 1990. In 1991 he took time out from IT to pursue other avenues. Studying English Literature and Political History at South Devon College before going on to major in Swedish at the University Of Wales, Lampeter. He spent a year at Göteborgs University and speaks fluent Swedish. He returned to IT in 1999 studying for an M.Sc. in Information Technology at De Montfort University, Leicester.

Initially a customer support technician at payment processing company Netbanx in Cambridge, UK he progressed rapidly into the world of software engineering. On return to his native New Zealand in 2004 he joined Netbyte Internet Ltd as a Java Web Developer and soon transitioned into a technical lead role. During this time he published his first technical article in the Java Developers Journal : Reporting Made Easy with JasperReports & Hibernate.

A former colleague from Netbyte Internet Ltd introduced him to Solnet Solutions Ltd where Peter has worked since early 2007. Currently he is working on a quality initiative project with a large Trans-Tasman insurance company.

Peter has a passion for software quality. He has practiced continuous integration techniques, including test automation and code inspection for longer than he can remember. Test Driven Development (TDD) and Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) have both been embraced and constantly implemented by Peter. Recently he has been evangelizing the benefits of Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) and the role it has to play within agile teams.

Peter has developed applications using C, C++, Perl, VB, Java and Groovy. He plans to utilise Scala and Clojure where appropriate in future applications.

He keeps abreast of numerous quality tools available for improving Java/Groovy applications and feels testing is undervalued and under-delivering in most projects. He includes developer testing in this assessment and emphasizes that improved developer/tester collaboration is essential to address this issue.

Recently he has begun coaching teams and facilitating workshops around the quality concepts he is so passionate about. He hopes to publish future articles related to quality and deliver quality angled technical presentations at local meet ups.

When Peter escapes from his laptop, he enjoys spending time with his fiancé Sarah and her son James (4). They enjoy exploring Auckland and spend a lot of time at the family bach located in Piha on the West coast. Peter also enjoys playing football (Over 35s) and is assistant coach at a local club. He also enjoys tenpin bowling and even won a National Team title with Waitakere in 2006.

Cato’s Place is where Peter blogs his thoughts, tips, tricks and information related to quality and how to build it in to applications.