Westpac NZ - Senior Automation Quality Engineer

Apr-2021 - Nov-2023

At Westpac I worked as a roving Quality Engineer across a number of teams. Learning new product domains, and technology stacks for both the product as well as the automation. It was fun and exciting, keeping me on my toes to quickly adapt and pickup new knowledge and skills. The common thread was always testing through learning and discovering the product and project. Identifying the biggest issues directly in front of us, as well as looking to the future for pitfalls to avoid.

References

2023 Stephen Stuart - Reference

Stephen was my People Lead for my duraction at Westpac

2023 Kate Nesmeylova - Reference Check for TTC Global

Kate was the Quality Engineering Chapter Area Lead for Westpac

2023 Hannah Gray - Reference

Hannah was team lead for the Test Environments team I was part of for 10 months

other linkedin recommendations - TBD

MF8TL Team: Legacy API Server Replacement

This team was implementing a replacement of a legacy API Server used by the bank's mobile and web apps. The old system had a mature API automation suite implemented using Java, TestNG, and REST Assured.

My work

Refactored and extended the existing mature API automation suite to test the replacement system.
Implemented method overloading to centralize reporting results to Splunk within the automation codebase.
Identified and applied suitable testing tools and processes from the old system to the new implementation.
Focused primarily on enhancing the API automation suite by creating new test scenarios using established patterns such as service classes, POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects), and extending base test classes.
Streamlined code, reduced duplication, and centralized request dispatching and response handling processes through Splunk integration efforts.

Test Environments Team

The main task this team worked on was to build a fun little webapp UI and API server using Node.js, Express.js, React, and the mermaid.js diagramming tool to create node maps of how various systems connected. In this project I was more a JavaScript developer than a tester.

Observability Squad

With this team I switched to a more Platform Engineering role, and became the Westpac Splunk Champion. We were supporting and growing the Splunk platform for Westpac internal technology teams. I have had exposure to Splunk in previous companies and have truly loved it for analysing data. I really like to try and find the customers' experiences come through the data. I would always ask the teams we were supporting on their Splunk onboarding journey three things:

Are you logging how well your product/service/feature is working? eg transactions per hour
Are you catching all the errors and warnings to know when the product/service/feature is doing something bad
When you observe an error/warning are you recording good quality information that truly helps devOps understand the issue, and expedites the remediation of the issue?

The latter I find particularly important because in the end the objective is to minimise the risk of major issues by knowing about them quickly, and also being able to solve them quickly. Timely & good quality information is paramount.

D365 KiwiSaver Squad

Built a Selenium WebDriver POM based cucumber Java automation suite from scratch to test a D365 webapp.

Mobile Squad

Manual and automated testing of Westpac's iOS & Android mobile apps.