Software problems are Dan Skwire’s main professional interest. Dan has a 40+-year career devoted to mission-critical software problem work: He is an expert in both problem resolution and problem prevention, on multiple operating system environments: mainframes, UNIX/Linux, Windows, and embedded special-purpose systems.

Dan’s experiences span multiple platforms. His initial career, projects and training were exclusively in mainframe- and mainframe-class environments: this was at IBM operating system and server development and test, and later technical sales support. Later, extensive non-mainframe support experiences first at Florida Power Corp, then at Encore Computer Corp, SUN Microsystems, and other companies, including Platform Solutions and Guardian Solutions, and the US Census Bureau gave Dan quite a diverse view of support, problem-solving, prevention and recovery across a broad spectrum of environments including multiple UNIX and Linux variants, non-IBM mainframe environments like HDS, Amdahl, Siemens BS/2000, and various Windows environments, including the Microsoft PocketPC.

In preventing software problems: Dan worked in organizations providing software problem recovery features in zOS, software test tools, best processes in all software development phases, inspections and walkthroughs for design, code, and testing, and availability studies to improve site availability (high-level ‘management studies’ to reduce numbers of occurrences or duration of service outages). Dan worked on system reconfiguration software features in zOS (testing and improving), Dan has provided continuous improvement ideas to prevent problem occurrence.

And from early on, Dan worked on products that facilitate problem-solving, and he has enjoyed everything one can do to improve problem-solving: teach debugging, teach best practices, teach testing, work on unsolved problems looking for ideas for needed future enhancements, create "FAQs", written articles that have been published, etc.

Dan started a group of professionals with a common interest: the linkedin Group devoted to "First Fault Problem Solving", now with 55 members. This is a great forum with many new discussions. Dan welcomes new members. There are participants from multiple companies, and participants work as hardware and also software specialists.

Dan wrote his first book in 2009 "First Fault Software Problem Solving: A Guide For Engineers, Managers, and Users" as a means of promoting best software engineering practices for producing and using software that maximizes efficiencies in problem-solving, as is found in well-engineered mission-critical enterprise-class ‘mainframe’ environments.

Examples are chosen from all platforms, and the general techniques and advice can benefit everyone to better solve production problems as soon as possible - of course, the goal is to solve problems when they FIRST occur! Despite everyone's best intentions, problems do occur!

Dan enjoys the whole software problem area; He is good at it, and he welcomes more challenges in this area. Dan is especially looking forward to further discussions of the issues raised in his book.

His email address is: dskwire@mindspring.com