Spencer Wilson Email & Phone Number

Calgary, Ab, Ca

Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Synopsys provides application security solutions including security analysis and testing products and services. In 2021 I was assigned to manage and advise a team in executing performance testing for five Java/PostgreSQL-based products that include single-tenant and multi-tenant, cloud native and hosted, and monolithic and microservices architectures. Beyond my technical leadership and hands-on work, my management responsibilities have included hiring (job specs, interviews), onboarding, and training to grow our team and enable performance testing as our product portfolio increased from one to five products. I also contribute to budget and resource planning, write performance reviews, and make recommendations for promotions. Highlights: • Built a checklist for product releases designed to ensure alignment on scope, reduce scope creep, and improve transparency for release progress. The checklist was adopted and modified by additional teams. • Led team in testing three new products with limited staff that enabled on-time release of MVPs. • Managed efforts to add performance testing support to an in-house, component-based testing framework as part of a shift left to integrate performance tests as part of developer GitLab pipelines to gate merge requests.• Represented Performance Engineering in presentations and discussions with Development, QA, Product, SREs, and executive-level stakeholders. Provided weekly updates to upper management on status. • Advised customers and customer-facing teams on performance best practices, CPU, memory, and container replica count for several products within the Synopsys portfolio.

Calgary, Alberta, Canada

In 2014 I was recruited internally to join a performance testing team and took on team lead responsibilities in 2017, with work focused on tests using Selenium (Java), Perl, and Bash. Highlights: • Drove the investigation, collaboration, resolution, and daily updates of a red hot, highly visible customer escalation, leading to successful de-escalation and retention of a key customer.• Implemented critical regression tests that are used to gate releases and drove performance of the primary product feature from minutes to seconds.• Significantly expanded performance testing coverage that enabled testing to cover both old and new features on each release.• Integrated performance tests into Jenkins, set up 40 bare metal Linux machines with Puppet, implemented a performance test harness, and drove additional automation to improve efficiency, scope expansion, and scaling.• Enhanced a Ruby on Rails reporting server to automate filing of Jira tickets when performance regressions were detected. Wrote specs, defined timelines, and implemented solution using RoR, Jira/Confluence APIs, and Angular.• Investigated and reproduced customer-reported performance issues for developers to diagnose and resolve, with multiple recommendations resulting in implementation by developers and customer requests for backports.• Adopted JMeter for API and command line performance testing. • Implemented NetData on all machines, stood up a Prometheus server for scraping metrics, and used Grafana for metrics visualization.

Calgary, Alberta, Canada

In 2013 I joined a six-member team at startup Coverity (which was then acquired by Synopsys) with focus on automated testing of a Java/PostgreSQL web app used by customers to view results of static code analysis. I learned test automation on the fly using Selenium WebDriver with Java for browser automation on Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Safari. Tests were executed in the cloud using Sauce Labs.Highlights:• Benchmarked lookup methods on all supported browsers to identify preferred methods. • Implemented on-prem support for screenshotting test failures for Selenium Grid after migration from Sauce Labs. • Wrote scripts to improve test failure triage capabilities and improve insights from test results. • Maintained a shared instance of the web app for manual use and wrote a script to automate the app’s daily deployment that has run every day for over nine years.

Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

At NTT I was assigned to the oil & gas technology provider Pason to contribute to development of DataHub, a web app with an MVC architecture built in Python and MySQL with components in C, Java, and JavaScript.Highlights:• Documented requirements, design, and collaborated with QA to develop test plans.• Assigned by management to launch and lead a new tier 3 support team after independently taking initiative to resolving customer tickets that were too complex for the existing support team. • Led investigations including analysis of logs, MySQL databases, and code. • Developed support tools to improve investigation efficiency, including a tool that retrieved JMS messages from MySQL, decrypted messages, and cleaned up resulting XML. • Served as system administrator for Xen VMs used for development and testing using Virsh, Munin, Monit, etc.

Bachelor Of Computing, Computing And Information Science

Courses included graduate level computer security, design and analysis of algorithms, data structures, compilers, theory of computation.

Education record

Graduated with an International Baccalaureate Certificate and an Advanced Studies Diploma. Awarded the silver medal and maxima cum laude.