Curriculum Vitae - Vincent Dirks

Intro - I'm a Full Stack Agile Quality Analyst

I love testing and will use all resources & tools at my disposal to do it. Every delivery team has different constraints, skills, processes, bottlenecks, and opportunities for how they deliver product & process changes. I'll try to leverage the skills and resources already in the team, and add my own skills and experiences, maybe sprinkle on some ideas from the test, agile, and dev communities, as well as, some plain experimentation, to best test and deliver the changes. Each context is different and I love adjusting the development, test, and delivery processes to match them to the context at hand. I like exploratory testing, and I also have fun coding automated checks. I do gravitate towards Context Driven Testing (CDT), and (largely) agree with the thoughts and expressions from the leaders of the CDT community, such as James Bach and Michael Bolton. I really like Agile, which for me is "autonomy with responsibility through trust".

I think the essence of software development is still about people: It is Driven by people, Made by people, and Made for people. We all have emotions, passions, motivators, and more! We're all different, and we all have something unique to give.

I love to work with people that have a passion for what they do, and have fun doing it! Testing is my professional passion, and I love working with people who respect and challenge me to be my best.

Skills

Testing

API Testing, Context Driven Testing, Risk Based Testing, Tool Assisted Exploratory Testing, Test Planning, Visual Modelling, Session and Thread Based Testing, Gherkin, Behaviour Driven Development, Metrics Driven Development, AB Testing, Mobile Testing, Mentoring & Induction, UAT, Firmware Testing.

Automation

Westpac(2.5yr): REST Assured ... XXX TBD
Fiserv (3.3yr): Postman & Newman, JavaScript(Node.js, Express.js, Pug), TFS, Powershell, SpecFlow & C#, SoapUI, SQL.
Trade Me (2yr): SoapUI/Groovy scripting, SQL, Protractor, XPATH & CSS locators.
LeasePlan (2yr): VBA/Access, SQL.

Programming

Javascript (Node.js, Express.js, Pug, Cypress.io, Webdriver.io), Java (Selenium, GWT, Robotics, JUnit), SQL, C#, Powershell, C, C++

Other

Splunk, Squad master, CI/CD, Deploy lead, Product demo's, Training, Manufacturing Resource Planning, Logistics, External Relationships, Radars, Lasers, Fibre-optics, Physics, Robotics, Statistics

What I'm reading, watching, listening, learning, and trying out in 2024

Interesting Reads

• A Context Driven Approach to Automation in Testing By James Bach and Michael Bolton
• Round Earth Test Strategy by James Bach

Interesting alternative to the "test automation pyramid". There are testing problems to consider at every level, Quality above requires quality below.

My Observability Project

• Express.js basic hello world and my node.js-in-the-cloud repo
• Kubernetes vs. Docker by Josh Campbell at Atlassian
  

I want to learn the difference between these technologies to see how it might apply to my Observability Project

• Setting up Docker Desktop at home to run the Docker Splunk Image

Archive of pre-2024 entries

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