Neil Jonathan Dickens

D.O.B: ** November ****, Nationality: British

E-mail address: acwv1n@r.postjobfree.com Tel: 079********

Profile

I am an experienced developer-in-test engineer, specialising in building and maintaining test automation suites, defining and improving BDD and agile test practices, as well as sculpting technical designs and ensuring business requirements are fully met through testing and communication.

Technical Skills

Testing tools – Selenium WebDriver, Cucumber JVM, Nightwatch.js, Yadda.js, Cucumber Ruby, Cucumber-Spring, Cucumber JS, Gherkin, Relish, Firebu, Fiddler, FitNesse, JUnit, JBehave, Soap UI, Rest-test Clients, J-Meter, XML Spy.

Code knowledge – Java, Javascript, Node.js, C#, CSS, X-Path, Ruby, XML, JSON, SQL, Groovy, MS Powershell.

Databases/Databases Tools – DB2, Sybase, Oracle, MySQL, Toad, DBVisualizer, Squirrel

Other Applications/Build tools – Github, Maven, NPM, IntelliJ, Eclipse, SVN, JIRA, Jenkins, TeamCity, Teamviewer, Weblogic, WinSCP, Putty, UNIX, Cygwin, Apache Tomcat, Ubuntu, Virtual box.

Qualifications/Additional Skills

ISEB – Foundation Certificate Software Testing. (May 2004)

BSc (Hons) Computer Science, Middlesex University, UK (Sept 2000 – Aug 2003)

Full UK driving license

Employment

(July 2015 - Present)

Royal Bank of Scotland – Technology – MyBank Account Opening. Central London.

Developer-in-test (Contract Role)

Working on the Account Opening project SCRUM team, we developed a web application which would be used by

personal bankers in branch to open a variety of current bank accounts.

The application was built to work on Chrome and Safari for Ipad OS, which I built an automation test framework for.

During my time I learned a lot about the banking business, compliance, form validation, working with credit and ID

checking systems. We also used a unique form of SCRUM which involved team defining acceptance criteria

requirements.

It was also my first time I used a Javascript/node.js test automation framework which helped my improve my

javascrpit and node.js skills. I worked closely with developers by sharing mock server repos, and checking out there

local code branches which helped me automate tests early and thus find bugs early. We also had a end-point java

framework which used Cucumber-JVM and REST assured to accomplish the same thing for the server side developers.

Duties and Accomplishments:

Created test framework using Yadda.js for cucumber style features, integrated with Nightwatch.js which is a Javascript framework using selenium server.

Above test framework built using NPM package library and ran using node.js, this was so Front-End developers could update and add tests whilst developing stories, which worked well.

Test framework was able to start, stop and edit mock server to simulate server responses.

Customized test framework to produce HTML reports, multiple browser testing, as well as making REST calls.

Organized framework to use common components and shared helper methods.

Created and maintained server-side framework which used Selenium Webdriver, REST-Assured and Cucumber-JVM to tests end-points in isolation, including end-point validation.

Configured tests ran on Team City and Jenkins build server.

Worked with Business, Scrum team, and Design team to define, review and maintain BDD scenarios.

Worked with core system to debug issues and ensure XML requests met requirements.

Used Browserstack to run test suites on all major browsers, including Mobile browsers.

(Apr 2013 – July 2015)

Thomson Reuters – Financial & Risk – World-Check One. Central London.

Developer-in-test (Contract Role)

The World-Check-One product is a web application, used internally by clients to screen names of individuals, vessels,

and organizations, allowing them to perform a wide range of actions on the matched results, which form cases.

Working with large amounts of data, strict legal and confidentiality requirements, client user administration, and

configuration requirements, as well as leading UX, styling and design teams exposed me to a new level of business,

skills and industry.

The World-Check-One project gave a lot of freedom to the development team to pick and sculpt the technologies and processes needed to implement a cutting edge reliable software application. As such, I got a great deal exposure to the technologies and development processes described below.

Duties and Accomplishments:

Built and Maintained the test automation framework test suite using Cucumber-JVM, Maven, JUnit, and Selenium WebDriver.

Created Gherkin features and scenarios, as well as defining cucumber tagging, directory, and format structure.

Configured several Jenkins jobs that ran the suite across all environments, detailing test results in cucumber report (Plugin).

Helped lead and mentor GitHub push/pull/merge/tagging/review strategy and execution allowing our team of 5-6 developer-in-test engineers, testers, and developers to contribute to the test suite and framework.

Built performance test scripts using JMeter and ran these to identify bottlenecks in the system, as well as report performance metrics.

Spear headed testing technical tasks and led manual test strategies.

Involved in security testing using REST API calls to identify flaws and gaps.

Plug-and-Pull testing by bringing down single nodes, and/or full modules, then running automation tests to soak test the system and find gaps in the recovery behavior.

Led Scrum and BDD testing and development process implementations and improvements, from Continuous Integration stages to production releases.

Helped to define and improve the release and deployment processes.

Gained experience in using and debugging with cutting edge system components including RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, Spring, Node.JS, and Dojo.JS.

(Mar 2013 – Apr 2013)

Concep – Digital Marketing software company, Chelsea,

Developer-in-test (Contract Role)

A Windows-based, C#, Java-Script environment, Concep provides user interfaces to clients wishing to simplify their

integration and interactions with the major CRM systems.

Duties and Accomplishments:

Creating BDD Gherkin Scenario files for the Developers to use as acceptance criteria for unit tests.

Built an automated test framework which uses the BDD Gherkin Feature files to drive and run the acceptance tests using Cucumber-JVM tool.

Implemented UI test scripts using Selenium WebDriver to navigate through front-end, and assert on key values, using advanced XPath and CSS location calls.

Implemented API Web service test scripts using REST-assured Java tool, which used XMLPath and JsonPath to set up test data, and assert values, as part of the full end-to-end integration tests.

Adapted test framework to run on IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera browsers.

Used Maven to run the test suite from the command line and the TeamCity build tool.

Used SauceLabs to test specific browser versions.

Manually tested releases, raising / tracking bugs, and reporting test coverage, as well as some user story writing, and Agile coaching.

(Dec 2012 – Mar 2013)

BSKYB – Broadcast Tape-less Integration Platform team, Osterley,

Senior QA Technical tester/Automation tester (Contract Role)

Sky Go digital media testing: This involved working with Sky Mobile and Smooth Streaming departments to

ensure the content our Media Asset Management (MAM) system produced, met the required metadata formats,

naming conventions, and quality check requirements.

Integration Platform automation testing: Tasked with creating an End-to-End test automation framework to aid

Regression and Acceptance testing, I did the following:

Used the latest 2012 Cucumber-JVM (Java) release as a framework to write BDD/TDD Gherkin scenario files.

From these scenario files I created Java Step Definition classes which called my JUnit methods/tests.

I created a wide range of Selenium WebDriver methods which my tests used to navigate through the UI.

Integrated self-written FTP and SOAPUI JUnit Methods /tests to create an automated End-to-End work flow.

Implemented Java code to pass and call variables/values such as file names and job ID’s to assert values through the different work-flow stages.

Used Maven to import jar files, separate test suites, and command line execution functionality.

Used Mule ESB and Soap UI to test API level work flows.

(Nov 2010 – Oct 2012)

BBC – DMI Fabric, White City, London,

Senior QA Technical tester/Automation tester (Contract Role)

My time on the BBC DMI (Digital Media Initiative) project, included an initial year of White box testing individual

components. Then a subsequent year of testing the end-to-end system work flows, which incorporated the above

applications with third party and external applications. These projects included Importing and Exporting

Media Content and XML Metadata from key clients including Sports, Journalism and RedBee Media, my duties included:

As the test team lead I was responsible for creating test strategies, implementing automation test frameworks and scripts, delegating test script execution, reporting test coverage and bug reports to senior management.

Working with Analysts and Product Owners to ensure requirements were fully met, and working as intended.

Creating several End-to-End automation test suites, using both Selenium and FitNesse tools, which ran on multiple test/staging environments, these involved creating and modifying existing Java fixtures to suit, as well as using X-path and CSS selector code to check results.

Configuring the aforementioned FitNesse/Selenium tests to run on the Jenkins build automation tool, which automatically starts them after each main build completes, and nightly as part of the regression suite.

Testing XML/JSON requests and responses to ensure validation code conformed to the desired Schema requirements using XML Spy and other Schema validation tools.

As these flows involved a number of individual components, I regularly checked server logs, property files, source code, to detect if issues where environmental or code related, to get the bugs / issues raised as precise as possible.

Carrying out numerous application demos to the 'Business' (over 20 people), at the end of each project.

Working closely with the Operations team to get the builds deployed onto the stage environment, this included configuration support, and then testing/signing off the release on Stage.

White box testing included: Designing and building FitNesse test suites locally, this included creating/updating Java Fixtures to cover all functionality.

Creating happy path, and negative path FitNesse tests, as well as investigating and fixing broken tests.

Using various REST Clients, and SOAP UI clients to manually test story functionality, as well as executing negative path exploratory testing, and then adding the key scenarios into the FitNesse test suite.

'Checking out', building, and deploying code drops using Cargo with Maven build tools.

Configuring Apache Tomcat server properties to achieve various environmental states.

Recording, scripting and executing J-Meter test scripts to Stress / Performance test Applications. Working closely with Product Owners to achieve realistic scenarios, and communicate results back.

Working in an agile scrum team, participating in stand ups, planning games, demos, retrospectives, and show cases as part of each sprint.

(Aug 2009 – Oct 2010)

TalkTalk Group, North Acton, London,

Senior QA Test Engineer \ Automated tester (Contract Role)

As part of the AOL Broadband, Tiscali, and TalkTalk integration process, I was a core member of the team

working on two key projects detailed below.

CPE (Modem) Gateway: This project involved building a gateway system that stored and managed all hardware orders (routers, T.V), received from the TRIO system to the hardware suppliers - BT and Anovo systems, my tasks:

Working in an agile scrum team, participating in T-Shirts, walk-throughs, planning games, demos, retrospectives, and showcases as part of each sprint.

Writing Cucumber\Gherkin scenario files as part of the walk-through process for each story, giving the developers a framework, and the ‘Business’ an understanding of what the scripts achieved.

Scripting and executing J-Meter test scripts, putting through thousands of XML requests through the web service as part of the performance testing requirements.

Leading showcases to demonstrate the sprints functionality to the various interested parties around the business.

AOL Broadband to Trio (TalkTalkGroup Billing System) Migration: For this key task of migrating over 2

million AOL Broadband customers onto the TRIO system, I performed the core manual, integration, and regression

testing, which involved:

Running each of the SQL based migration scripts into the integration environments, then verifying the results.

Writing and executing complex SQL queries as part of the verification process.

Leading the QA on the Order Capture Tool implementation, which was used to capture all customer orders whilst they were being migrated.

Leading the QA on the CDR (Call Detail Records) splitter project. I was involved in the key Integration testing between the two main billing systems - TRIO and DISE - as millions of billing records were at stake.

(Feb 2007 – July 2009)

AOL Broadband, Hammersmith, London,

Senior QA Test Engineer \ Automated tester (Contract Role)

In my second spell at AOL I was asked to come back to lead the Production Support QA team. My main focus was the testing of the Broadband Management System (BBMS), my achievements included:

Managed the QA testing for over 30 successful releases all of which required Smoke and Cut-over Testing.

Performed Integration and automation testing between the various external systems, including the AOL Talk system, DISE, billing management system, and DNA (Direct Network Authentication) system.

My principal duties included:

Working in Test Automation team writing and executing Selenium scripts.

Working closely with the Technical and Business Analysts to formulate stories and test scripts.

Testing new deployments prior to going live.

Working directly with developers and Technical Analysts to resolve bugs and other issues.

Providing input into the development of new testing strategies and testing methodologies.

I have also used Apache, Subversion, Weblogic and Cruise Control to manage builds and deployments.

(Feb 2006 – Feb 2007)

Betfair, The Sporting Exchange Ltd., Hammersmith, London

Functional QA Test Engineer

During my time, I worked in the Exchange Games team of Betfair; testing the Exchange Games Website, which consisted of an Oracle Database, Java Middle Tier and .NET Front end. My achievements and duties included:

Working on five different projects, including the testing of two new Exchange Games, a company wide integration project and the introduction of a Turbo version of each game.

I was QA lead for an End-To-End Test harness project, which included using MS Powershell to convert all existing manual test scripts into fully Automated test scripts. I also produced a Test Plan, User Guide and various presentations for this project.

Producing key estimates, Functional Test script creation, Test Execution, and investigation of production issues.

Functional Specification Document reviews and analysis.

Testing all layers of the environment, such as our Oracle Database using SQL commands, our API using MS Powershell commands and manually tested the front-end interface and functionality.

Working closely with our Dev team to find, fix and close numerous critical defects, involving incorrect Customer Account Balances, invalid betting, incorrect game logic and problems with the Tools Console.

(March 2004 – Feb 2006)

Testhouse, Stratford, London

Test Consultant

I worked at Testhouse, where I was trained to use various test tools, as well as studying the different test strategies and methodologies. For most of my time I worked on client sites, most of which are listed below:

AOL, London (Aug 2005 – Feb 2006) Functional QA Test Engineer

During my time I used ‘Agile’ test methodologies on a J2EE environment for use in the Broadband Business Management Systems (BBMS).

Various testing roles on projects at Capgemeni (Woking), RBS (Edinburgh), and Argos (Milton Keynes) (March 2004 – July 2005)

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