Westpac NZ - Senior Automation Quality Engineer
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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.
- MF8TL Team
- MF8, aka Mobile First V8, was a legacy API product, and was part of a mobile and web app development eco system sold by IBM. MF8 needed to be replaced with a new temporary solution, MF8TL, prior to migrating all functionality to micro-services. MF8 & MF8TL were effectively API (middleware) services facilitating access to the wider banking network. MF8TL needed to be stood up quickly, and behave identically to the legacy MF8 system.
- My involvement with the team was to identify existing testing tools and processes used for the old MF8 system, and to apply them to the new MF8TL implementation.
- Primarily I worked to adapt an existing REST Assured, testng, Java automation suite. I created new scenarios following the patterns already used in the suite, using service classes, POJOs, extending base test classes etc. I also significantly refactored parts to standardise and improve the information logged to Splunk when failures were detected, using method overloading to remove duplicated code, centralising the code that despatches requests & receives the responses, creating a single place to verify the kind of response received, prior to transforming to the success response POJO's.
- 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.