Curriculum Vitae - Vincent Dirks

Vincent Dirks - Software Quality Engineer

I am a generalist Software Quality Engineer, always keen to learn the product, team, technology, and organisational contexts, to adapt myself to them, and then use my skills and knowledge to perform the role required from me. I am able to test solutions and processes directly, and also love to help engineer the whole interconnected ecosystem necessary to efficiently determine and monitor the quality of a software solution. Automating the product itself, as well as preparing the product to be ready for testing, version control and branching strategy, CI/CD pipelines, creating test environments and infrastructure, preparing test data, capture and aggregation of (test) environment logging and monitoring data, and many more, all of these tasks lend themselves to degrees of automation.

I really like testing things, as well as developing tools that help us do it efficiently.

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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