Helping testers make sense of DevOps: https://training.kato-coaching.com/preorder-devops-fundamentals-socials

I founded Kato Coaching to share my experience of 20 years in software testing in high delivering teams with other testers, test managers and teams.

Initially brought in as Test Architect, I was soon promoted to Head of Delivery. My main achievement here was bringing down cycle time (measured from when a ticket was declared ready to be worked on) from over a week to an average of 1.5 days by coaching the team in agile working methods, and encouraging practices such as pairing, slicing and other lean methods. Other achievements: Led the design of a comprehensive test strategy to enable continuous integration, as well as the development of the new framework, moving from Cucumber and Nightwatch to Cypress and automated tests run as part of the CI/CD pipeline.Facilitated bi-weekly knowledge sharing sessions in the team.Facilitated the yearly leadership planning session. Delivered team communication strategies to improve team cohesion and happiness.Right hand to CTO, to form a high-delivering team, retain talent and meet stakeholder expectations.

Worked on a number of assignments, primarily as Quality Coach to blended teams of client and consultant developers to deliver well tested, predictable results for our clients while facilitating their digital transformation. Healthcare: the development of an online booking system.Fintech: the development of a mobile app.Healthcare: a self-service system for registering access to regulated APIs.Healthcare: the conversion of a very large legacy codebase from Python2 to Python3.

I lead the test team for implementing a new, business critical feature (Dashboards), and was the scrum master on the engineering team to establish a CI workflow with automated tests being run as part of the pipeline, facilitate early discovery with product, engineering and test, introducing 3 amigos and other agile methods, as well as hands on writing of automated tests in Java and Selenium Webdriver.

Here I was the team lead for the frontend/UI test team, before moving over to lead the mobile test team. I also ran all scrum ceremonies for the UI team, delivered progress updates to the stakeholders, and worked closely with the product owner on both projects, the COO of the company. Furthermore I spearheaded some projects to improve employee happiness, taking advantage of the flat hierarchy in this startup to assist the founders in finding data to guide decisions on where their money was best spent to retain their talent.

Contract position. Community management on Facebook, Twitter, forum. Community support via Salesforce and Parature systems.

- Testing the integration of a new backend for online transactions, including recurring membership payments, game card redemption and gift certificates - Creation and maintenance of complex test plans for a phased roll-out of the new billing backend- Verification of country-specific entry criteria to ensure customers are offered a regionally appropriate choice of payment methods and currencies - Cross browser testing- Test planning, including test plan/case writing, time estimates and prioritizing test areas.- Bug tracking, including triage from localization testers, in JIRA. - Bug reporting in JIRA. - Updating existing documentation, as well as providing new documentation for current projects and workflow. - Re-evaluation of existing test suites, according to new backlog tasks added during daily Scrum meetings. - Experience working with/as part of remote teams.

- Testing all game content for linguistic issues- Assisting the translators in editing translated content- Creation of test plans with focus on linguistic verification of content - Documentation of Global Testing procedures

- Assisting with test case creation, test suite planning, implementing automated regression tests on a project to enable non-US customers to use local payment methods in our billing system.- Lead QA, test suite planning and execution for a new, simplified payment system which allows Users to purchase L$ (the Second Life currency, which can be exchanged for US$ and back) more easily.- Some automated testing using the Python extension “funkload” was part of the project, as was utilizing Selenium for regression testing.- On this and all other projects, I worked as part of an Agile/Scrum Team, and started the test plan creation from a list of user stories.- Test suite planning and execution for “Avatars United”, a website for virtual world socializing acquired by Linden Lab. (supporting role)- Test suite planning and execution for our newly acquired GSA search engine. (supporting role)