Valentin Popa
Verified Expert in Engineering
Quality Assurance Developer
Iași, Iași County, Romania
Toptal member since February 17, 2021
For the past decade, Valentin has harnessed his passion for software testing, test automation, and new technologies to help clients achieve their business goals and reduce costs. He is skilled in managing multiple priorities and can effectively switch concurrent projects. Valentin has a solid knowledge of both back-end and front-end testing, using programming languages such as Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, or Ruby and tools like Selenium, Cypress, or Ranorex.
Portfolio
Experience
- Test Automation - 8 years
- APIs - 8 years
- Java - 8 years
- Selenium - 8 years
- Cypress - 2 years
- JavaScript - 2 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 2 years
- Appium - 1 year
Availability
Preferred Environment
Linux, MacOS, WebDriver, Java, Cypress
The most amazing...
...test automation system that I developed helped our client reduce regression time from 16 days to less than a day.
Work Experience
Test Contractor
Self-employed
- Helped teams to plan and execute testing, then release their products.
- Created and maintained front-end, back-end, and performance test automation frameworks.
- Contributed as part of the release process, from sign-off to actual production deployments.
- Made use of AWS infrastructure, e.g. S3, EC2, ECS, Cloudformation, Cloudwatch, API Gateway, and Lambdas.
- Led comprehensive knowledge transfer sessions to other teams.
Test Trainer
Wantsome
- Taught manual and automated software testing to people looking for a career reconversion.
- Created and maintained course resources (PDFs, PPTs, and video recordings).
- Focused on practice—weekly hands-on sessions for a better understanding of the concepts.
- Created practical resources such as test website, test DBs, and test APIs.
- Kept track of student progress by weekly evaluation through home assignments and quizzes.
Test Automation Engineer
Ness Digital Engineering
- Developed the REST API automation framework and other protocols such as SMTP, IMAP, FTP, AOS, CIFS, CMIS and WebDav, along with integration tests between them.
- Reduced the manual regression time by several days by introducing a new test automation system that included the above frameworks, for which a custom DSL was developed.
- Added support and automated tests for web-based applications using Selenium.
- Integrated server-side operations making use of a custom JMX client.
- Implemented a test automation framework that validates an integration between Gerrit and Jenkins.
- Performed code reviews for other automated frameworks.
- Contributed to the design and implementation of other automated frameworks.
- Created test reports that included the test execution results, bug fixes, and new features validation status.
- Focused on documentation for configuration, how-to, and end-to-end workflows.
Test Automation Engineer
Softvision
- Led testing-related interviews for new employees.
- Wrote automated tests in JAVA for several automation frameworks—REST APIs, Selenium, desktop clients automation, and SOAP APIs.
- Automated a desktop application with Sikuli.
- Set up Jenkins jobs for several QA environments and tracked pipeline execution.
- Reviewed internal university courses and evaluated them.
Software Tester
Mind CTI
- Performed document analysis to identify possible non conformities between requirements and software (including technical documentation).
- Analyzed requirements and design specifications and determining test scenarios.
- Designed, documented, and executed test scenarios from the test plans, implementing test automation suites/scripts.
- Troubleshot problems and narrowed down problem areas.
- Resolved issues by working closely with application software development, system lab support, systems engineering, and other needed organizations.
Experience
Fintech Startup
Team Collaboration Tool
Big Data
OKR App
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University - Iasi, Romania
Certifications
ISTQB Certified Tester
SEETB
Skills
Libraries/APIs
WebDriver, Playwright, REST APIs, Sikuli, React Testing Library, React
Tools
Postman, Jira, REST Assured, Git, GitLab, Cucumber, BrowserStack, GitHub, Jenkins, Apache Maven, Gradle, TFS, Apache JMeter, Grafana k6, Gatling Load Testing, Bamboo, CircleCI, Gatling, Amazon CloudWatch, Xcode
Languages
HTML, Java, Python, C#, Kotlin, Bash, JavaScript, Scala, Groovy, Python 3, Gherkin, TypeScript, SQL
Frameworks
Selenium, JUnit, TestNG, Cypress, Ranorex, Appium, Spring, Kotest, Jest, TestCafe, Android SDK, Protractor
Paradigms
Manual Testing, Test Automation, Automated Testing, Testing, Functional Testing, Scrum, E2E Testing, Software Testing, DevOps, Test-driven Development (TDD), Unit Testing, Azure DevOps
Platforms
Docker, Linux, MacOS, Bitrise, Amazon Web Services (AWS), PagerDuty, Testsigma, AWS Lambda, Azure, Kubernetes, Shopify
Industry Expertise
Teaching
Storage
MongoDB, Datadog
Other
APIs, Manual QA, Quality Assurance (QA), QA Test Plan Management, QA Leadership, QA Testing, Mobile App Testing, QA Automation, Test Cases, API Testing, Automated UI Testing, Regression Testing, Software QA, UI Testing, Agile QA, Web App Testing, Test Engineering, Integration Testing, UI Automation, Documentation, Requirement Traceability Matrices, Leading Quality Assurance (LQA), Quality Assurance Management, Quality Management, GitHub Actions, Mobile Device QA Automation, CI/CD Pipelines, eCommerce, Web Services, Test Planning, OWASP, OWASP Top 10
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