About Wayne

I’m a software engineering and testing professional with decades of experience building teams, writing books, and helping organizations improve quality and delivery.

This page gives you the full story of my background, work, and writing, while still keeping the structure easy to scan and read.

Work Experience

I am a software engineer, tester, test leader. Most of my career has been at Microsoft. I started as a phone support engineer, helping customers with Microsoft Word. I worked on the original MSN 1.0 team as a tester, starting in April, 1994. After two and a half releases of MSN, I worked on both Microsoft Commercial Internet Services, and Microsoft Site Server.

Microsoft

Toward the end of the 1990s I was one of the original founding members of the Microsoft Sharepoint team, and stayed with that as a test lead, test manager, tester, software design engineer through multiple iterations until 2012. At that point I moved to the Office Engineering team, which builds the tools, services, and systems used to ship Microsoft Office. In 2014 became a software engineer as part of Microsoft’s overall movement to align development and testing into a single job role.

Ford Motor Company

In 2024 I began work as an SDET Manager at Ford Motor Company, in the Integrated Services division. There I worked with several product teams, guiding and advising them on quality engineering processes for both testing and development. Under my guidance, teams within that group moved from entirely manual deployment process that released builds into production once or twice a month to automated processes releasing builds on a near daily basis. Throughout all of this, I retained a full-commitment to serious, dedicated testing that goes beyond the simple checks needed of CI/CD pipelines to strategies that support deep, exploratory testing work that accomodates and supports rapid iteration cycles.

Lifelong Dedication to Testing

Across my career I have worked on GUI applications, client-server software, enterprise servers, proprietary online services, and large-scale cloud hosted software. I have spent years working with, design, and utilizing automation systems. I enjoy pushing boundaries of innovation with software testing, and automation.