Joshua Pendragon

Hi, I’m Joshua Pendragon, and I'm an SDET with a strong background in user advocacy, quality assurance, and clean code. I went to school for network security and philosophy and started my career in customer support and system administration. After relocating with my wife to Austin in 2019, I've found myself immersed in a variety of QA and leadership roles across several startups. I have several years of experience in creating and maintaining automated test suites, frameworks, and integrations using Playwright, Cypress, TypeScript/JavaScript, and various API tools in an Agile environment.

My passion is to align human interaction with technology by ensuring the quality, reliability, and accessibility of software products. I have successfully migrated the end-to-end tests from Cypress to Playwright, reducing runtime by 85%, and incorporated accessibility standards into our design and testing via WCAG, Axe/Arc, and the A11y Project. I have also contributed to the test automation community by sharing my expertise and best practices through blogs, podcasts, and webinars.

As a strategic thinker, I focus on bridging gaps within organizations by aligning their vision and goals. I look for ways to make a significant impact through small changes, such as writing new test coverage, performing manual testing, drafting documentation to deconstruct silos, or bringing data and perspective to the people who need it.

I am passionate about learning new technologies to broaden my skill set. Currently, I am working on side projects in Rust, C++, Go, HTMX, and SurrealDb. When I'm not coding, I enjoy playing WoW or FFXIV, clearing my unplayed Steam backlog, or practicing a song from Stronghold on the mandolin.

I am a proud supporter of the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto and strive for excellence in software development. I am actively seeking opportunities in software engineering and QA automation. 

If my skills and experience align with your needs, feel free to reach out and say hello!

Software Development Engineer in Test, OvationCXM, Remote             Oct 2022 – Nov 2023

Core Competencies: Product Launches, User Advocacy, Collaboration, Constructive Result-oriented Feedback

Pivoted from automation contributor to owning and leading cross-product test development and implementation.

• Led a Playwright project for front-end E2E and API back-end integration and performance testing.  
• Shipped full and resilient automated smoke test coverage in CI/CD (~80 test cases, ~17 min @ 4 worker threads).
• Gave mentorship, performed unit tests and product code reviews, and ran workshops for a team of 6.
• Performed daily triage and analysis of Datadog alerts, pipeline failures, and user issue reports.

Product Test Engineer, OvationCXM, Remote                                                       Nov 2021 – Oct 2022

Core Competencies: Test Automation, Performance Testing, Collaboration, User Experience, Reliability

Shifted focus from manual testing to test automation, data analytics, and accessibility compliance.

• Achieved a 6x increase in speed and better traceability by transpiling Cypress to Playwright.
• Wrote and maintained automated testing framework integrations with CI/CD (GitLab), Issue tracking (Jira), test data generation (Tonic), and Test Case Management (TestRails).
• Researched and delivered WCAG compliance requirements such as tab order, contrast ratio, and aria attributes for a keystone client by incorporating accessibility into our software development life cycle  
• Improved automated regression test resistance, reducing the flake rate from 25% to 6% by pair-programming with developers, writing technical guidance, and committing both test and production code across the stack. 

QA Analyst, OvationCXM, Remote                                                                     Jun 2021 – Nov 2021

Core Competencies: Test Automation, Self-directed work, Test Planning

Promoted from client support to QA process maturation and test automation adoption.

• Matured our test plan by migrating and grooming ~150 test cases from spreadsheets to TestRail.
• Helped launch our test automation efforts in end-to-end and performance testing as a founding contributor.
• Made and ran our first-ever end-to-end test run via CICD.
• Built several custom views and dashboards, 2 workflows, and ~15 automations in Jira.

Senior Product Operations Specialist, TRAY POS, Phoenix, AZ               Dec 2018 – Jan 2021

Core Competencies: Client Service, Release Management, Collaboration, Working Autonomously

Promoted to senior ProdOps to reflect my diverse and self-motivated operational, quality, and leadership duties.

• Managed and self-directed diverse operational, quality, and leadership duties in a hybrid POS application.
• Led a team of 3 internal and 12 outsourced staff, contributing significantly to the product development process.
• Built and tooled a workflow with Trello to streamline and normalize our onboarding process, enabling a later prospect’s multi-location pilot launch.
• Earned Employee of the Quarter for outstanding contributions.

Client Success Specialist, TRAY POS, Phoenix, AZ                                         May 2018 – Dec 2018

Core Competencies: Client Service, Advocacy, Collaboration, Problem-solving, Attention to detail

Installed and supported a cloud-based, web/mobile hybrid Point-of-Sale for ~200 business locations. 

• Provisioned, maintained, and administered several key business systems (Zendesk, Salesforce, Jira, multiple mobile device management platforms, TeamViewer) as a Business Operations administrator. 
• Prioritized tasks, validated, and groomed bugs and feature requests (often same-day) with regression testing.

GED, Rio Salado College                                                                       2009