Sam Woods

June 10, 2015

2015, Bios Sam Woods

Puppet Labs

Sam Woods recently joined Puppet Labs as a Senior Software QA Engineer with 17 years of QA and automation experience, including 13 years at Microsoft. He is a self taught developer who has evolved to the point of helping multiple mid to large size organizations create automation strategies, build strong automation teams, create the necessary automation infrastructure to support the strategies, and then execute on them. He has presented on UI automation at the local Portland Selenium meet up and presented multiple times to audiences as large as 300 people within the companies he has worked for. He currently has the 5th highest all time ranking on the SQA Stack Exchange [2] forum. Sam gets excited about improving efficiency through both automation and best practices, as well as getting into the weeds with automation and automation infrastructure. Outside of work, Sam enjoys singing karaoke and spending lots of daddy time with his two young daughters.

An Interview

Why did you choose to present your paper at PNSQC?

I enjoy sharing knowledge and helping people become better automators. PNSQC has a lot of people who are truly interested in improving their skills, and I hope to help them do so.

Is there anything PNSQC attendees should know about your topic before attending your presentation?

People brand new to automation or UI automation may be in a little over their head, but I think there is plenty they can learn still. Intermediate to advanced automators may be surprised and find a few new tricks to add to their arsenal.

Are there any quality-related books, articles, blogs or other media you'd like to recommend to PNSQC attendees?

I am active on http://sqa.stackexchange.com and would recommend anyone with QA or automation questions to visit there. There are a few true experts there who are very helpful and knowledgeable.

What do you think is the next big trend, topic or challenge for software quality?

The next ‘big trend’ in QA for years has been that manual testing is going the way of the dinosaurs. I’m not sure that is entirely accurate, but I have seen the bar raise steadily for QA staff over the last 18 years of my career. Along with the ‘Agile’ movement, there has and will continue to be a blurring of lines among developers and QA, and the more technical QA people with strong automation skills are sure to sift to the top in environments like that.

Papers/Presentations

Obtaining True UI Automation Speed - Sam Woods, 2015 Technical Paper, Abstract, Paper, Slides, Notes, Video.

(Visited 72 times, 1 visits today)

Puppet Labs

An Interview

Papers/Presentations

Search the Blog

Latest Tweets

Trending Content

Search the Archives

Trending Content

2022 Conference