Mark is available for hire
Hire MarkMark Collin
Verified Expert in Engineering
Quality Assurance Consultant and Developer
Location
Tingewick, United Kingdom
Toptal Member Since
March 17, 2022
Mark is a seasoned consultant with a wide range of skills and a can-do attitude. He has 20+ years of industry experience, ten specializing in test automation. Mark has worn many hats throughout this time and has also focused on the product side, managing and delivering high-profile projects like the HMRC mobile app. Mark has experience across multiple domains, including finance, card payments, government, and telecommunications, and believes that fast feedback is the key to successful delivery.
Portfolio
HM Revenue & Customs
Scala, Selenium, Gatling, Bash, OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP), Wave, Axe, Docker
Sainsburys Argos
Java, Go, C++
PaymentSense
Go, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Android
Experience
Availability
Part-time
Preferred Environment
MacOS, IntelliJ IDEA, Bash, Selenium, Java, Scala
The most amazing...
...project I've kicked off was the HMRC's mobile app. We went from a basic idea to the initial release on the app store in 12 weeks.
Work Experience
QA Consultant
2020 - PRESENT
HM Revenue & Customs
- Integrated the team that built tools for the Customer Insight Platform that provides HMRC the ability to check bank account details and address details for users of HMRC's services; Awarded the Best Public Sector IT Project in the UK IT awards 2021.
- Created generic components used to collect and validate the address and bank account information from businesses and individuals.
- Helped deliver the UK government's Job Retention Scheme, Self Employment Income Support Scheme, and changes to the Statutory Sick Pay scheme that helped millions of people in the UK during COVID-19 and throughout lockdowns.
- Worked with open banking API providers and credit reference agencies to validate bank account data.
- Developed and ran tests for various test phases: acceptance, security, performance, accessibility.
- Built pipelines up to date and working as expected.
- Played a key role as responsible for production deployments and support.
- Created exemplar test frameworks to guide teams using the above component services to test their integrations.
Technologies: Scala, Selenium, Gatling, Bash, OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP), Wave, Axe, Docker
Technical Program Manager
2019 - 2020
Sainsburys Argos
- Cooperated closely with Ingenico to identify, classify and fix all issues with the remote firmware update process of the existing portable electronic devices (PED). We identified and fixed the problems holding the project back for over a year.
- Worked with Oracle to manage contactless updates to the existing POS software.
- Facilitated the addition of Argos to Sainsbury's Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network managed by Telefónica.
- Liaised with the acquirers–Barclaycard and Amex–to ensure that all stores moved onto the Ingenico solution were correctly configured and would be able to take payments.
- Collaborated with the Argos security team to ensure that relevant parts of the solution were compliant with the payment card industry data security standard (PCI DSS) and fit for the qualified security assessor (QSA) assessment.
Technologies: Java, Go, C++
Project Manager
2019 - 2019
PaymentSense
- Collaborated with Visa, MasterCard, and PCI to ensure that all relevant security requirements for the application that we were designing were accounted for.
- Coordinated with security labs in the Netherlands to arrange security training and initial submission to the lab for our application certification.
- Managed work between the UK dev team and external suppliers in the US.
- Arranged the application accessibility certification with the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB).
Technologies: Go, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Android
QA Consultant
2018 - 2018
Curve
- Worked in collaboration with the CTO and VP of engineering through test strategy plans.
- Provided training and mentoring to the existing testers.
- Created a test card generation harness that rendered scannable card images for testing.
- Fixed, consolidated, and enhanced the existing test harnesses to enable the automated integration testing of the Curve mobile apps.
- Introduced K6 as a load testing solution since no load testing tools were in use.
Technologies: Go, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Java, Appium, Android, iOS, K6, Charles Proxy
Trainer
2017 - 2018
Intersection Co.
- Trained and mentored developers in the US on effective software development practises.
- Helped to define the hiring process for new team members and trained the US development team on interview techniques.
- Made the release process a 1-Click process from Buildkite. Previously, it required a developer to run a series of Python scripts on their own laptop.
- Reduced the building time of their custom Android open source project (AOSP) fork from 20 hours to 40 minutes.
- Moved the building process from the tech leads laptop to a proper building and release pipeline running on AWS that was automatically triggered when pushed the code to the source control.
Technologies: Java, Groovy, Gradle, Apache Maven, Bash, Python, Scala, Appium, Selenium, REST Assured, Charles Proxy, Buildkite, Datadog, Docker
Delivery Lead
2016 - 2017
HM Revenue & Customs
- Kicked off the HMRC mobile app project, going from a basic idea to an initial release on the App Store in 12 weeks.
- Worked closely with HMRC’s head of user research and head of design to agree on the look and feel of the mobile application.
- Defined the initial feature set of the mobile application.
- Collaborated with the API platform team to define the API integration.
- Presented and demoed the application to various stakeholders across HMRC.
- Created Selenium and Appium tests for the mobile application.
Technologies: Scala, Appium, Applitools, Selenium, OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP), Charles Proxy, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker
QA Consultant
2015 - 2016
Elsevier
- Developed a Selenium test framework to automate the upload of Word documents into the document parser and check that they were parsed correctly.
- Created performance tests for the dashboard project using Gatling.
- Built pipelines for both products enabling a 1-Click deployment.
Technologies: Java, Selenium, REST Assured, Gatling, AngularJS, CSS, HTML
QA Consultant
2013 - 2015
Visa Europe
- Wrote a parallel implementation for the existing scenario tests, this reduced the time taken to complete a test run from around 20 minutes to about 4 minutes.
- Owned the testing activities for the team and core responsibility for writing automated functional tests.
- Kept Docker containers and built pipelines up to date for our application.
- Worked closely with the security team to ensure the performance of the appropriate security testing.
- Collaborated with the performance test team to keep track of any potential performance issues, ensuring issues were fixed early in the development lifecycle.
Technologies: Java, Selenium, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Bash, Protractor, Docker
QA Consultant
2012 - 2013
Telefónica
- Developed a Selenium framework and wrote all the front-end automation, which involved lots of interaction with the Google Maps API via JavaScript executor.
- Used ZAP proxy to find security vulnerabilities in the code we had written; the Selenium tests were used to train the system.
- Created a suite of performance tests using The Grinder while ensuring we only tested our endpoints, not Google's.
Technologies: Java, Groovy, Selenium, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP)
Experience
HMRC Mobile App
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/hmrc/id514561561This mobile app gives users access to HMRC's information on their personal tax affairs.
They can use the HMRC mobile app to:
• Check their next salary payment from your employer
• Check their following tax credit payments
• Find their tax code
• Find out how much income tax they should pay
• Manage and renew their tax credits
• Access their Help to Save account
• Work out their take-home pay with the tax calculator
• Claim a refund if they've paid too much tax
• Check progress on forms they have sent to HMRC
• Read messages from HMRC
I started up the team that created this new HMRC mobile application and managed the project from inception to initial release. After the initial release, the development moved from London to Worthing, at which point I transitioned to remote work and took on a more advisory role with a focus on QA.
They can use the HMRC mobile app to:
• Check their next salary payment from your employer
• Check their following tax credit payments
• Find their tax code
• Find out how much income tax they should pay
• Manage and renew their tax credits
• Access their Help to Save account
• Work out their take-home pay with the tax calculator
• Claim a refund if they've paid too much tax
• Check progress on forms they have sent to HMRC
• Read messages from HMRC
I started up the team that created this new HMRC mobile application and managed the project from inception to initial release. After the initial release, the development moved from London to Worthing, at which point I transitioned to remote work and took on a more advisory role with a focus on QA.
JMeter Maven Plugin
https://jmeter.lazerycode.com/An open-source Maven plugin to run JMeter tests in any Maven project.
This plugin ensures the team uses a consistent JMeter version with the same plugins and dependencies for all of their performance tests.
This plugin ensures the team uses a consistent JMeter version with the same plugins and dependencies for all of their performance tests.
Skills
Languages
Java, Bash, Scala, C#, HTML, CSS, Groovy, JavaScript, Go, C++, Python, SQL
Frameworks
Selenium, Appium, TestNG, AngularJS, Protractor
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs
Tools
IntelliJ IDEA, Gatling, OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP), Charles Proxy, Apache JMeter, Apache Maven, Jira, BrowserStack, Postman, Git, Cucumber, Gradle, REST Assured
Paradigms
Test Automation, Testing, Manual Testing, Page Object Model (POM), Automated Testing
Platforms
MacOS, Docker, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Android, iOS, Buildkite, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure
Other
Quality Assurance (QA), QA Automation, QA Testing, UI Testing, Automated UI Testing, SDET, Manual QA, Software QA, API Testing, Website QA, UI Automation, Mobile App Testing, Wave, Axe, K6, Mobile Device QA Automation, CI/CD Pipelines, Applitools, Sauce Labs
Storage
JSON, Datadog, Azure Cosmos DB
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