Josh Brennecke

** ******* *** • Leominster, MA **453 • 651-***-**** • ad4fub@r.postjobfree.com

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

Software Quality Assurance (SQA) Engineer with over 12 years of SQA testing, management, and leadership experience. Passionate about building and leading QA teams by instilling a collaborative mindset and quality-focused approach to all QA functions and responsibilities. Motivated by creating a department, culture, and development resources that allow the QA team to do their best work, make the biggest impact on their respective teams and within the organization, and collectively achieve their individual and team goals.

CORE QUALIFICATIONS

Accomplished leader within the QA team and the broader Engineering department

Comprehensive knowledge of QA testing methodologies and strategies

Proven success in managing, developing, and mentoring QA engineers of all levels

Adept at moving between strategic and tactical thinking

Highly proficient at developing QA team objectives, measuring critical deliverables, and setting

Excellent communication skills (written & verbal) allow matching message with intended audience

Demonstrated ability to understand, test, and support complex, heavily interdependent systems

Strong analytical and problem-solving skills

SKILLS

Automation Testing: Java, Selenium, Cucumber/Gherkin (BDD), Cypress, Postman

Dev Tools: Maven, Git, Jenkins, IntelliJ, Linux

AWS: EC2, S3, SNS, SQS

Indexing/search engine: Lucene & Solr UI

People management (multi-unit, distributed)

Project & Bug Tracking: JIRA, Rally

SDLC Methods: Agile (Scrum; Kanban), Waterfall

RDBMSs: PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server

DB Langs: SQL, PL/pgSQL, Oracle PL/SQL, MS T-SQL

EXPERIENCE

BRANDWATCH (formerly Crimson Hexagon), Boston, MA Oct 2016 – Jul 2023

Engineering Director, QA Feb ‘23 – Jul ‘23

Led the globally distributed, 20-person QA team performing manual & automation testing

Provided direction on all aspects of the QA team including the QA strategy, quality standards, performance metrics, career development paths, and technical growth programs

Assigned QA resources to project teams as appropriate to achieve product and engineering goals

Directly managed 5 QA individual contributors (mid-level through principal) and 2 QA managers

Managed QA staffing and expenses budgets

Aligned front-end and back-end automation strategies for improved reporting and leadership visibility

Recognized by leadership and cross-functional teams as a trusted QA expert, leader by example, and a dedicated and highly respected cross-functional partner that consistently delivered the highest quality work output as an individual contributor as well as a manager and director

Engineering Manager, QA Oct ‘21 – Feb ‘23

Led the QA strategy development effort; presented it to leadership and the R&D team (500+ people)

Consistently set the engineering team standard for how a top tribe collaborates, performs the SDLC process, and delivers the expected results

Extended to the wider Data Ingestion tribe the use of behavior rules within Feature Files significantly improving product behavior documentation, test scenario design, and measuring test coverage

Conducted numerous teach-outs, trainings, and coaching events for diverse group of R&D members

Hired and managed 4 individual contributors (3 employees and 1 contractor)

Supervised staging environment configurations, data retention and access policies, and AWS costs

Senior QA Engineer Oct ‘16 – Oct ‘21

Wrote test plans, test cases, and executed manual and automated tests (front-end, back-end, API, and Lucene

Introduced behavior rules concept within BDD and Cucumber automation platform for own squad; became the go-to resource for using this approach

Heavily influenced the product UI design overhaul, oauth workflow, and related data model

Wrote most complete set of product behavior rules within all of Engineering squads

Worked very closely with front-end and back-end developers to design, develop, test, and deploy hundreds of releases across many product iterations, migrations, and merges

ENERNOC, Boston, MA May 2012 – Sep 2016

Senior Software QA Engineer

Provided comprehensive QA testing of existing and new feature changes, updates, maintenance, and bug fixes on the company’s Demand Response and Energy Intelligence Software applications. Ensured adequate and appropriate positive, negative, and regression test scenarios ensuring proper balance between effort and risk.

Directly tested more than 500 user stories and 1000s of test cases with only 2 associated bugs

Automated tasks within the new program launch process which reduced development and testing time from 2 weeks to 2 days per new program; saved 1200+ man-hours annually

Developed and executed test strategy/plan for the company’s high-priority DR ’14 project enabling critical energy data to be populated in dashboards more than 50% faster than earlier product

Led the QA department’s transition to using BDD/Cucumber methodologies including coaching of teams, teach-outs and presentations, and was recognized for outstanding partnership by QA Automation team

INSTALLERNET, North Andover, MA Apr 2009 – Dec 2011

Senior Developer, Database Development and Quality Assurance

Developed and managed testing operations for company’s web-based product offerings

Performed individual development and QA work as well as cross-functional team direction of 6 employees for developing multiple, high-priority IT projects including customer-facing UI applications, complex database back-end infrastructure, and end-to-end QA test plan creation, execution, and reporting.

Designed and implemented DB architecture to integrate inventory and logistics processes into core platform

EDUCATION

Mechanical Engineering: University of Missouri KC Kansas City, MO

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