Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Area
I'm the Automation Panda: an advocate for software quality who loves to help others. For about a decade, I worked as a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET), building solutions to testing problems and rising from junior level to team lead across multiple companies. Then, I spent almost two years leading Developer Relations at Applitools, where I championed visual testing with AI and served as Director of Test Automation University. Now, I lead both Product and Engineering for Cycle Labs, where I'm shaping the most excellent testing platform for supply chain systems. I speak internationally at conferences, webinars, and workshops. I write a software blog at AutomationPanda.com. I'm the lead developer of Boa Constrictor, the .NET Screenplay Pattern. I created four courses for Test Automation University. I've built test automation solutions from the ground up. I've also done consulting to help teams with testing, automation, and BDD. My favorite languages are Python, C#, Java, and JavaScript, but I can quickly pick up anything. Please feel free to reach out to me!
At Cycle Labs, I lead the organization responsible for building and delivering the Cycle Testing Platform used by enterprise companies in the supply chain and warehouse management space to test and validate complex business processes. As Senior Director of Product & Engineering, I oversee Product Management, Engineering, and QA, aligning these teams around a shared vision and strategy for the platform. My focus is on turning customer problems into scalable product capabilities while ensuring our teams execute with clarity, speed, and quality. I am responsible for casting product vision, forming strategy, and driving execution—guiding the platform from early discovery through delivery and continuous improvement. This includes shaping the roadmap, enabling strong cross-functional collaboration, and ensuring the team delivers meaningful outcomes for our customers and partners. I do my best to practice servant leadership to empower the members of my team to be the best that they can be. I remain deeply engaged with emerging development practices, including driving the team to adopt agentic AI workflow to build an "assembly line" for product delivery that speeds up our process by multiples of our previous output.
In this role, I lead the Product Management function for Cycle Labs. I helped enterprise-level companies in the supply chain and warehouse management space optimize how they tested their business processes from inspiration to implementation with the Cycle Testing Platform. As Senior Director of Product Management, I led what we built into the Cycle Testing Platform and its packages, focusing on the three key phases of development and testing: Discovery, Formulation, and Automation. My work involved putting in the REPS: - RESEARCH – listening to customers about their challenges and learning their domains - EXPERIMENT – rapidly designing and prototyping possible solutions to those challenges - PLAN – collaborating cross-functionally to cast vision, form strategy, and build a roadmap - SHIP – preparing materials, delivering features, and measuring outcomes During my time in this role, I helped define the product’s future vision, shaped the strategy for what to build, and developed a step-by-step roadmap to get there. I also helped assemble and grow a world-class team focused on advancing test automation. Together, we delivered a wide range of valuable outcomes, including: - a VS Code extension for improved editing - a reporting dashboard for better triage and troubleshooting - a step plugin mechanism for extending the platform beyond what Cycle Labs alone could provide - a Chrome Recorder extension that enabled automation without programming skills - more efficient web steps that improved execution time by 15–25% From time to time, I also jumped into hands-on coding to build prototypes, support the team, and fix bugs. I became an advocate for AI-assisted development, introducing the team to emerging tools and techniques to accelerate engineering productivity.
I first joined Cycle Labs as Principal Architect. In this role, I cast a new vision for the Cycle Testing Platform and began building it out. I started building a new reporting dashboard for Cycle as well as new step plugins for the CycleScript language.
After I stepped down from my role as Principal Developer Advocate and Director of TAU to join Cycle Labs, I remained available to Applitools as a part-time consultant to foster a smooth transition for the Developer Relations practice.
I led the Developer Relations practice at Applitools. As a Developer Advocate, I stood between the company and the community of software developers and testers. In one direction, I helped community members learn about good practices for testing, automation, and quality, and I also helped them get the most value out of visual testing with Applitools products. In the other direction, I listened to the needs of the community and shared those insights back to Applitools to help make our products and support better. Advocacy carried many responsibilities. I frequently delivered talks, workshops, and articles about software development and testing topics. I helped solicit and review content from other community leaders for the Applitools blog. I redeveloped several of Applitools' most popular tutorials. I launched the Applitools Ambassadors program. I gave feedback to development teams about our products. I listened to the challenges our customers face. And ultimately, I sought to add value wherever my skills could help.
As part of leading Developer Relations at Applitools, I also served as Director of Test Automation University, one of the best online platforms for learning about software testing and automation. We offered several courses on tools, frameworks, and recommended practices taught by the world's leading experts. Plus, all courses were completely FREE, thanks to Applitools' sponsorship. As Director, I planned upcoming courses, collaborated with instructors to develop material, and published courses once they were ready. I also helped maintain the site on the backend.
I led testing and automation for PrecisionLender at Q2. Before acquisition, I established quality and testing practices as PrecisionLender's first Software Engineer in Test. (Q2 acquired PrecisionLender on October 31, 2019. My role was unchanged.) My main project was "Boa" - a black-box feature test automation solution for Web UIs and REST APIs. Boa was PrecisionLender's first major comprehensive integration and end-to-end test automation solution. I initiated, designed, and built it from the ground-up using C#, SpecFlow, Selenium WebDriver, and a number of other open source packages. We ran up to 10k tests daily in our TeamCity continuous integration environment with high-scale parallel execution (50-100x) using Selenium Grid. The tests protected our products against numerous serious bugs. I was the creator and lead developer of Boa Constrictor, the .NET Screenplay Pattern. Boa Constrictor was the cornerstone of the Boa test solution. In October 2020, Q2 released Boa Constrictor as an open source project with a public NuGet package. Visit the project here: https://github.com/q2ebanking/boa-constrictor. I was the tech lead of our small "Test Engineering & Architecture" team, whose charter was to develop test automation and testing practices for all product development teams. On my team, I mentored my team mates to become the best Software Engineers in Test that they could be. My team and I developed many Boa tests for the PL App, and we also led developers to regularly develop new Boa tests together with new their new features. We also helped teams get more value out of their tickets, meetings, and designs through championing and guiding Behavior-Driven Development practices like Three Amigos Meetings and Example Mapping. I gladly lent a hand whenever someone needed help or wants advice. I represented Q2 as a speaker at several conferences and meetups. Check out my talks here: https://automationpanda.com/speaking/.
I taught the Software Quality Assurance course for the Computer Science department. I helped develop the material, and then I taught it online for one semester. We used Python for test automation. I loved building up the next generation of professionals in my specific discipline.
At LexisNexis, I worked on the Lexis Advance US Automation Tools & Frameworks team. My responsibilities included developing the shared framework for Lexis Advance test automation (C#/Selenium/SpecFlow with Jenkins), proposing and implementing improvements, supporting test engineers who work across various Agile development teams, and writing good documentation. I became the "master of the framework", delivering numerous improvements for page objects, service calls, test inputs, parallel execution, Extent logging, and data caching. I also administered my team's Jenkins projects for CI/CD and VSTS project area. I also consulted with other teams across the company to give guidance on test automation and behavior-driven development. I was the leader of the Quality Guild's Automation League. I led workshops, helped set up and improve automation projects, and developed useful training materials. Many teams used the automation code and resources I developed. For example, I designed and developed a Java/Cucumber/REST-Assured framework for the Shared Service QA team. When I first joined LexisNexis, I was the test automation leader for the Lexis Answers team, a new feature using AI to better answer search questions. I developed a test automation strategy and automated a number of early functional tests.