Adam Howard Email & Phone Number

Wellington, New Zealand

Wellington, New Zealand

In addition to continuing to lead the Quality Engineering Enablement team, I took on both people and engineering leadership responsibilities for two additional teams. One of those automates the provision of exemplary skeleton components for product engineering teams, and the other owns and maintains our common front end platform through which Single Page Applications are run.Together, our shared purpose was in helping to make engineering at Xero good, fast and easy. As a large and diverse group of individuals and teams, this was both a challenging and hugely rewarding assignment.

Wellington, New Zealand

I built and led a Quality Engineering Enablement team at Xero. In doing so, I developed and executed an enablement model to allow us to influence and build capability at scale across the organisation.This included defining great quality engineering practices (through shared principles, an aspirational vision, fundamental standards, and metrics); enabling teams via skill growth and tooling (through coaching, education, published guidance, and tool development); and advocating for quality engineering uplift with teams and leaders (through building and nurturing a community of practice, contribution to large programmes of work, and engaging stakeholders).The team comprised four Leas Engineers who specialised in differing areas of software development and with a passion for quality. I provided the leadership and strategic direction but gave them the freedom and initiative to identify and solve gnarly problems.

Wellington, New Zealand

I joined Xero as a Principal Engineer in the Engineering Practice group, charged with uplifting the quality engineering capability in the organisation.I set about building a community of practice around quality engineering; devising a quality engineering vision for teams to work towards; and establishing a Quality Engineering Standard as part of Xero’s wider engineering standards.As well as supporting teams through coaching and programmes of work, I built the foundations for an enablement team that could truly grow the quality engineering capabilities of our teams and, ultimately, the quality of our products.

Wellington, New Zealand

At some point "Test Practice Manager" became "Engineering Practice Manager", although this largely reflected that my role had already spilled some way beyond the bounds of just testing practice.Most notably, I helped establish and hire for a dedicated Security function; designed and oversaw our incident management playbook; managed our test environments and production deployment processes; and formed a team of Lead Engineers with a diverse array of skills to enable practice improvement at scale across the organisation. Plus all the testing stuff mentioned below!

Wellington, New Zealand

As Test Practice Manager at Trade Me, I was responsible for the development of testing practices across NZ's largest online marketplace. This was an incredibly diverse and enjoyable role that included driving our overall testing strategy as part of our wider engineering leadership team, nurturing the Test Guild community, designing and running training and skills workshops for test- and non-testing staff across the org, owning our test infrastructure and environments, overseeing our deploy processes and incident management operations, and generally doing whatever was required.Some of the highlights were: driving a significant uptick in the visibility and value of test automation at Trade Me; developing the Test Guild into a highly effective and productive community that was held up as an example to other Guilds; developing a suite of internal training to modernise our testing practices; engaging with hundreds of "non-testing" staff to communicate the value of testing and get them engaged in owning quality; and conceiving and driving a project to modernise our limited, static test environments into a dynamic, cloud-based solution that unshackled our development teams.

Wellington, New Zealand

As Test Chapter Lead for Marketplace, my role was to help the merry band of testers who look after the buying and selling of general items on the site to keep developing the way they performed testing and collaborated with their agile delivery teams.This included day to day leadership, coaching and advice, regular weekly sessions as a chapter, and the occasional formal training session; covering topics ranging from visual modelling, exploratory testing, automated testing of APIs, and much more besides.I was also a member of the Marketplace delivery leadership team, helping to support and guide a successful delivery team working on multiple complex and high profile projects at a time, including Trade Me's 'book a courier' service and the launch of a new touch-focused responsive website.

Wellington, New Zealand

I joined Assurity as part of their Graduate Programme in 2011 and, through my contribution to a number of large scale projects, quickly developed a broad range of testing and leadership skills, performing project roles as a Test Analyst, Senior Test Analyst, Test Lead and Test Manager.I was also actively involved in developing the Lean Testing practice, helping develop Assurity's capability to deliver innovative testing services, and I co-created and taught the public Testing Overdrive and Testing Jumpstart education courses, as well as Assurity's Graduate Programme and various internal workshops.I also held a Circle Lead role through which I worked with staff in a coaching and mentoring capacity in order to help them to develop the skills and experience to take their careers where they want them to go.

Wellington, New Zealand

Wellington, New Zealand

Http://Theythinkitsallover.Wordpress.Com

As a passionate football fan, I felt there to be a dearth of intelligent and well reasoned commentary on the sport available online.As such, I took up the task of writing unbiased and thoughtful essay-style articles on all aspects of the sport for my own website, which was at one time ranked the 17th most influential English Premier League site on the internet.As a result of this, I was asked to write freelance for a number of other online and print publications, providing regular content and reviews relating to the beautiful game.Having entered full time employment, I entered a hiatus from writing in 2011, but hope to pick up the pen again at some point in the future.

Wellington, New Zealand

I was engaged as a research assistant to gather and collate data for a Health Sponsorship Council investigation into motorcycle activity around intersections in Wellington city, with a view to trying to reduce the number of collisions between motorcycles and cars.To this end, I conducted observations at five identified hot spots around Wellington, before collating and cleaning the data into a manageable set for analysis.

Wellington, New Zealand

I was engaged by Victoria University's Disability Services to act as a professional note-taker for students suffering from disabilities, having previously been involved as a volunteer.In particular, I worked alongside deaf students and used electronic note-taking technology to provide real-time, verbatim transcriptions of lectures, enabling them to overcome obstacles to tertiary study.I also provided tailored, hand-written notes for students with other disabilities; worked as a reader/writer for students with injury or disability at exam time; and developed and presented a seminar on note-taking skills to the Services' team of volunteer note-takers.