I'm Mat, a Senior QA Engineer/QA Lead/QA Manager. I've been in the industry for over 20 years, the vast majority of which has been spent in QA/software testing roles across industry sectors including defence and oil & gas. I've worked at companies ranging from start-ups to multi-nationals and much prefer the former. I've been hands-on my entire career and plan to stay that way as I am passionate about software quality. A few years ago, having spent much of my career in manual testing roles or working with outdated technology, I began an extensive program of reskilling and self-development around automated testing using resources such as LinkedIn Learning and Test Automation University that continues to this day.

🔭 I’m currently working on developing a portfolio of automated testing example projects in a variety of programming languages and using a range of tools and technologies.

I hope these projects can be used to kickstart future projects - whether that's my own personal projects or new work projects - and also for others to learn from and maybe use as a starting point for their own projects since these example repos are all public. I am taking the various skills and tools I have learned, both on the job and from training courses, and am developing projects that capture what I have learned. That way I have a record of what I have learned and having put it in practice I am less likely to forget it. It also means I have something to refer back to even after I have left a particular role and no longer have access to the code I wrote for that organisation.

Originally many of the example projects I created were based around Selenium (v3) as that was the tool with which I was most familiar. Based on the number of stars and forks these repos gained they were obviously useful to others getting started with automated UI testing, which is great to see. However, Selenium has developed significantly since the projects were created which means the repos are now quite outdated. The direction in which my career has gone has seen me move me away from using Selenium and I haven't had the desire or opportunity to update the example projects to the latest Selenium version so I have retired them. My focus now is more towards Cypress and Playwright and I plan to create several example projects showcasing the power of this exciting new generation of automated testing tools.

While my repos are largely examples of automated testing projects, most of them are more than bare bones templates as I enjoy writing automated tests and find that I learn more from each project I develop.

I am using publicly available resources (e.g. websites, APIs etc) in my projects so am not reliant on proprietary materials. For example, if I learn something in Cypress at work, I will try to incorporate that same trick into a personal project that uses a publicly available website intended for training purposes.

🌱 I’m currently developing:

• Cypress UI test suites
• Playwright UI test suites
• GitHub Actions examples

🎓 I am also learning:

• frontend development (FreeCodeCamp) - the better I understand an application's frontend code the better I can test it
• TypeScript
• VueJS
• contract testing (Pact)

📚 I plan to learn more about:

• visual testing
• unit testing
• backend testing techniques