Vinodkumar Kouthal — Automation Engineer
I have always admired people with coding skills, developers with their headphones and hoodies on, and typists on their edge of a breakthrough with new technology and the end result was exceptional. But at that time I was a manual tester at TechM for the first 3 years of my career, with a routine of QA, emails, spreadsheets, endless calls and dream of working onsite! However, I like breaking things, and as part of the fun in breaking things is finding ways to make them better. And I’m a good observer to understand the things happening around. This is what I loved about my job at TechM, as a QA, analyze the business requirement, code developed and then try to break the application (I prefer hammer!) with an intention that software meets its criteria with better user experience. But, I always had the urge to learn and test my coding abilities with the ambition of continuing my career in the QA as an automation developer. With this decision, I started learning Java and Selenium myself and came to a realization of the benefits of the internet, which is, it’s not just for entertainment! I’m one of those employees who suffered from 90 days of the notice period and a lack of coding ability. By God’s grace, and a lot of late-night coding practice, and after almost a year of intense job search, I was finally able to get an opportunity as a ‘Test Automation Lead’ at Stride.AI. Stride is an AI platform for enhancing operational productivity for financial institutions. Stride as a strict policy of coding in python, which was the first challenge I faced at work. Being an only QA guy again started utilizing the internet resources and bothering developers sitting next to me, I was able to up my skills, learn, implement and integrate a new automation framework for the team. Later, looking into product timelines, the next challenge was to thrive to code faster and deliver accuracy numbers on the data points to the developers on time and let’s just say those numbers made me fall in a love-hate relationship with the developers. It's been 2 years, now my daily routine has been Linux, terminal, SubLime, GitHub, Slack, and fewer emails and calls. Over the course of a year, I got promoted as Sr. Test Automation Lead with the responsibility of a team and started contributing to the test community, by writing articles and teaching automation course. Language: Python Libraries: selenium, pytest and plugins, requests, openpyxl, tox Reporting Tools: pytest-HTML, Allure Frameworks: POM, Data-Driven, Django, Jenkins Technology: Machine Learning, OCR, NLP, Deep Learning
Stackforce AI infers this person is a Test Automation Lead with expertise in Fintech and SaaS environments.
Location: Koppal, Karnataka, India
Experience: 11 yrs
Skills
- Automation Framework
- Quality Assurance
Career Highlights
- Transitioned from manual testing to automation leadership.
- Developed multiple automation frameworks using Python and Selenium.
- Contributed to the test community through articles and teaching.
Work Experience
Hwelett Packard
Python Automation Engineer (3 yrs 3 mos)
Career Break
Travel (4 mos)
Nutanix
Senior Automation Engineer (2 yrs 2 mos)
Stride.ai Inc
Senior Test Automation Lead (11 mos)
Test Automation Lead (1 yr 3 mos)
Tech Mahindra
Associate Software Engineer (3 yrs 1 mo)
Education
Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) at Nitte Meenakshi Institute of Technology
PUC at J.S.S college, Dharwad
school at St. Francis De Sales, Koppal, Karnataka
