““Ali always showed kindness, empathy and respect for her coworkers. She has a way of telling you that your code is broken and not making it feel like a defeat. She’d be my first pick to lead any testing effort.””
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS
Trello
I was the sole tester for Trello from before its launch in 2011 up until 2014. That meant I was responsible for everything quality-related: Writing reusable test cases. Testing on a slew of different browsers and operating systems (and eventually on mobile devices.) Making sure that testing didn’t become a bottleneck. Acting as an advocate for end users. Navigating 5-7 different developer personalities and work styles without a hitch. Working with customer support when something went awry in the wild. Finding tons of bugs, inconsistencies and points of confusion quickly (and communicating them clearly and kindly) before releasing to the live site (and we released new features and fixes to the live site several times per week). Having been an integral part of a wonderful company which was later acquired for $425M by Atlassian makes me extremely proud.
Fog Creek Software
In 2008, Joel Spolsky hired me to be one of two QA testers at Fog Creek for their FogBugz and Copilot products, and I led that team for two years. To say it was challenging is a wild understatement. We’re talking a team of hardcore, super smart, young developers who had never worked with testers before and, frankly, weren’t keen on someone coming in and telling them what they’d screwed up. At least, that was their perception in the beginning. Because of my philosophy of the importance of keeping coders and customers happy, within a very short amount of time, I had developers telling me that they’d never imagined that having their code tested could be fun (!) and that they’d become better developers because of my thorough work and thoughtful communication style. Having a dedicated tester resulted in faster release cycles, far fewer bugs reaching the customers and a much less difficult time for the customer support team to try to reproduce tricky customer issues.
FREELANCE WORK
Amplify
At the start of the pandemic, I was was brought in as the sole tester during the creation, launch and maintenance of Wide Open School, as a subcontractor for Common Sense Media. The small WordPress team designed, built, tested and launched this educational tool, built specifically for homeschooling during the pandemic, for parents and children within 2 weeks. The tester role was pivotal for this project (which lasted approximately 1.5 years until Wide Open School was sunsetted once schools were back in session) as constant functional and design changes were being implemented and a nimble release cycle was crucial.
Additionally, I worked as the test lead for several newly created Amplify microsites on the 4-person, Agile WordPress team which included all test case writing, testing in the QA/staging/production environments and bug reporting.
Inside the Orchestra
When the pandemic began, I was brought in to help this test this non profit's newly online-only programming approximately every 3 months.
ProjectEd / Entangled Solutions
As the Senior Quality Assurance Engineer for ProjectEd / Entangled Solutions, I had the opportunity to work on a variety of projects for an array of educational and philanthropic organizations. My main focus was testing the web app for XQ, whose mission is to transform America’s high schools. I performed 99% of testing for the XQ website which involved manual testing of both the web and mobile apps, as well as copy editing and proofreading downloadable PDFs, online guides relating to education reform and other resources.
Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy
In July 2019, I completed a two-phase testing project for the Parks Conservancy’s Park Youth Collaborative website. Working closely with the developer, I created a Trello board for us to easily communicate about the myriad issues that I uncovered and, because of this, we were able to quickly and easily get everything fixed and verified, on time and under budget.
Copilot
When Copilot needed a dedicated tester for some major changes to both product functionality and the website, they contacted me. And when they needed someone to up their Facebook page game, I did that, as well.