Tom Ashley has over eleven years’ experience in the IT profession, both in government and the private sector. In preparing expert reports, Tom has forensically analyzed project schedule delay, tested software performance, installed and tested prior art hardware and software, and conducted comparisons of program source code and user interfaces to determine whether copying has occurred.

Tom has significant experience with the analysis of software project failure disputes. Tom has conducted in-depth investigations of various issues of fact in software failure disputes, including requirements elaboration, requirements traceability, test planning and execution, defect remediation, and project planning and scheduling. In conducting these investigations, Tom has applied analytical methods widely accepted in the IT industry. These include the review of testing systems such as HP Quality Center, JIRA, and Team Foundation Server (TFS), analysis of defect open/close rates, application of Critical Path Method (CPM), and investigations of the use of project management methodologies such as Waterfall and Agile.

Additionally, Tom supports patent litigation by conducting in-depth source code review relating to patent infringement and non-infringement claims. Examples of such investigations include the examination and analysis of source code for telecommunications software, video compression tools, and graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for Smartphones. Tom has also assisted attorneys in the selection and installation of “prior art” systems to challenge the validity of asserted patents. In performing such work, Tom has reconstructed highly complex, vintage hardware to demonstrate the presence of relevant functionality.

Similarly, Tom has investigated factual issues in disputes relating to software copyrights and trademark infringement. These investigations have included the review and comparison of source code and graphical user interfaces. Tom has also conducted in-depth investigations of online trademark infringement, involving extensive research of domain name registrations, HTML metadata analysis, and web traffic data.