Test Automation Engineer
Designing and building test automation solutions across a wide range of clients, stacks and team cultures. Over the years this has grown far beyond writing tests: I design test strategies, build frameworks from scratch, speak at conferences nationally and internationally, train teams and help organisations take software quality seriously. The work that sent me down the DevOps path is the same work I still do every day.
Duration: Oct 2022 → present · 3 yrs 7 mo
"Quality is not a phase at the end of the sprint. It's a shared responsibility that needs a strategy, not just a test suite."
Milestones
- Designed test frameworks from scratch for multiple clients
- Helped teams migrate large test suites to modern tooling
- Designed a test automation strategy for one of the biggest banks in The Netherlands
- Helped companies take software quality seriously as an organisational practice
- Gave training sessions and spoke at MeetUps on test automation
- Spoke at conferences both nationally and internationally
Skills & Tools
Challenges & Solutions
Clients often had legacy test suites built on outdated tooling, with years of accumulated technical debt and fragile tests no one trusted.
Redesigned the test strategy end-to-end, auditing what was worth keeping, defining a migration path to modern tooling (Playwright / TypeScript) and running both suites in parallel during the transition to keep the team's confidence high.
Teams would write tests but never make quality gates a real part of their pipeline. Tests ran locally but CI was an afterthought.
Set up pipelines from the ground up with efficient parallelisation, clear reporting and fast smoke checks on every PR. Making the feedback loop fast and visible turned quality checks from a chore into a habit.
Sharing knowledge and driving change in large, politically complex organisations where multiple teams and stakeholders have conflicting priorities.
Leaned into public speaking and structured training to build credibility and focused on showing, not just telling, through live demos, clear metrics and incremental wins that gave teams a reason to buy in.
Resources
Playwright Documentation
docs
TypeScript Handbook
docs
Test Automation University
course
Ministry of Testing
article
Selenium WebDriver Docs
docs
Continuous Delivery — Jez Humble & David Farley
book