The environment
Old Mutual Bank is one of South Africa's largest financial services groups, serving millions of customers across savings, investments, insurance, and banking products. The technology organisation operates in a hybrid Agile delivery model, with multiple squads shipping digital product features continuously. Ashley's team is responsible for the quality of customer-facing web and mobile banking applications — where performance, security, and correctness are non-negotiable. Every defect that reaches production in this environment carries financial, regulatory, and reputational risk. The QA function is the last line of defence.
Ashley stepped into her current role as a QA Automation Engineer with a mandate to bring structured, automated quality assurance to digital banking products. Operating in a fast-paced, sprint-based delivery team, she ensures that web and mobile banking applications are thoroughly tested before every release — and that the automation infrastructure grows to match the pace of delivery.
Core responsibilities
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Web automation with Selenium WebDriver
Designs and maintains automated test suites for web-based banking applications using Selenium WebDriver. Scripts cover critical financial user journeys — account dashboards, transaction flows, balance displays, and user authentication. Test suites are integrated into the CI/CD pipeline so that regressions are caught on every build, not just before release windows.
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Modern web testing with Playwright
Leverages Playwright for complex, modern web application testing — including asynchronous page behaviour, dynamic content loading, and cross-browser validation. Playwright's superior handling of modern JavaScript frameworks makes it the tool of choice for next-generation banking UI components.
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Mobile application testing with Appium
Executes automated and manual testing on iOS and Android banking applications using Appium. Mobile testing covers gesture-based interactions, device-specific rendering, push notification behaviour, biometric authentication flows, and offline/connectivity edge cases — ensuring the app performs reliably across the diversity of devices South African banking customers use.
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API testing and contract validation with Postman
Builds and executes Postman collections to test backend APIs that power banking services. Validates correct responses for both well-formed and malformed requests — testing for boundary conditions, authentication edge cases, error handling, and data integrity. API-level bugs are cheaper to catch and fix than UI-level defects discovered later in the cycle.
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Agile delivery participation
Active participant in Scrum ceremonies — sprint planning (advocating for test time and highlighting QA risk), daily stand-ups (raising blockers, sharing testing progress), sprint refinement (challenging acceptance criteria and flagging untestable stories before development begins), and retrospectives (improving team delivery processes continuously).
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Defect management and lifecycle tracking in JIRA
Logs every defect with full reproduction steps, environment context, severity classification, and screen evidence. Tracks defect status from discovery through developer assignment, fix, and retest. Generates sprint-level defect metrics that help the team identify recurring problem areas and focus quality efforts where they matter most.
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QA documentation in Confluence
Maintains structured QA documentation including test plans, test strategies, test run records, and release sign-off reports. Documentation satisfies both internal governance requirements and the external audit trails required by South Africa's financial services regulatory framework (FSCA, POPIA compliance).
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Cross-functional collaboration
Works daily alongside software developers, product owners, business analysts, UX designers, and security engineers. Ashley bridges technical and business perspectives — translating product vision into quality criteria, and test findings into business-relevant risk assessments that help product owners make informed release decisions.
End result & business impact
Customer experience protected
Millions of Old Mutual Bank customers rely on digital banking applications for daily financial management. Ashley's testing ensures they encounter reliable, accurate, and secure digital experiences. Every defect caught before release is a customer frustration, a support call, or a trust incident that never happens.
Delivery velocity with confidence
Automation enables continuous regression coverage. Development teams can ship features, refactor code, and make infrastructure changes without fear of silent regressions — because the test suite will tell them immediately if something breaks. Speed and safety coexist because of the automation Ashley maintains.
Regulatory and compliance confidence
Financial services in South Africa operate under FSCA, POPIA, and internal banking governance frameworks. Ashley's documentation provides the evidence trail that demonstrates the organisation tested rigorously before release — critical during audits and regulatory reviews.
Selenium WebDriverPlaywrightAppium
PostmanAPI TestingMobile Testing
JIRAConfluenceAgile / Scrum
CI/CD IntegrationRegression TestingFunctional Testing
Banking TechnologyFintech
The environment
HWSETA (Health and Welfare Sector Education and Training Authority) is a government entity that manages workplace skills development and training grants for health and welfare sector employees across South Africa. Their technology infrastructure runs on Odoo ERP — across three different versions simultaneously (v8, v12, and v17), each supporting different business units and legacy processes. Testing in this environment meant managing the QA complexity of a multi-version, multi-module enterprise system where a change in one part of the platform could cascade unpredictably into others. Add to this a government compliance mandate, and the stakes for quality were high.
Promoted from intern to Systems Tester based on demonstrated performance and attention to detail — Ashley stepped into full ownership of QA across HWSETA's enterprise systems. This role gave her deep experience in ERP testing complexity, government-sector compliance requirements, and the challenge of maintaining quality across a multi-version software estate.
Core responsibilities
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End-to-end functional testing of Odoo ERP modules
Executed comprehensive functional testing across Odoo v8, v12, and v17 — covering the WSP (Workplace Skills Plan) module, supply chain and procurement workflows, and the helpdesk optimisation system. Functional testing at this depth requires understanding the business logic behind the system — not just whether buttons work, but whether the data flows correctly between modules and the outcomes match regulatory requirements.
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Regression testing across multi-version ERP
Designed and executed regression test packs to validate that module updates and system changes didn't break existing functionality. In a multi-version ERP environment, this required maintaining version-specific test documentation and understanding which features behaved differently across Odoo versions — a level of system knowledge that takes months to develop.
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Exploratory testing and investigative QA
Complemented scripted testing with structured exploratory sessions — using deep system knowledge and investigative instinct to find the defects that test cases don't anticipate. Exploratory testing is where experienced QA engineers find the genuinely surprising bugs: the ones that emerge from unexpected user behaviour, unusual data combinations, or system states that no one thought to script.
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User roles and permissions validation
Managed and tested the access control matrix across HWSETA's ERP systems — verifying that each user role had exactly the access it should, and nothing more. In a government environment handling sensitive employee and grant data, access control testing is as critical as functional testing. A permission misconfiguration could expose personal data or enable unauthorised financial transactions.
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Dashboard analytics and performance reporting
Compiled and interpreted system performance dashboards using Power BI and Tableau — translating raw testing data into visual insights on system health, testing coverage gaps, and defect trends over time. These reports gave management the evidence-based visibility they needed to make deployment decisions, track system reliability, and demonstrate organisational accountability.
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Collaboration with developers and business analysts
Worked closely with the development team to challenge and refine acceptance criteria before testing began — catching scope ambiguities that would otherwise generate rework. Translated business requirements into testable scenarios that developers could build to with confidence, and communicated defect findings in terms that both technical and non-technical stakeholders could act on.
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Agile testing in daily stand-ups and sprint reviews
Participated in Agile delivery ceremonies — contributing a QA perspective to sprint planning, raising testing blockers in stand-ups, and presenting QA outcomes in sprint reviews. Helped the team develop a shared understanding of quality gates and the conditions required for a story to be considered truly done.
End result & business impact
Government service delivery protected
HWSETA's systems process skills grants, training records, and compliance submissions for tens of thousands of health and welfare sector workers. A production defect in these systems doesn't just create a support ticket — it can delay grant payments, corrupt skills records, or trigger non-compliance with the Skills Development Act. Ashley's QA work prevented all of this.
Multi-version ERP stability
Managing quality across Odoo v8, v12, and v17 simultaneously is one of the most demanding ERP testing scenarios — each version has different behaviour, different UI, and different APIs. Ashley's discipline around regression prevented version updates from cascading into system-wide failures, preserving operational continuity.
Evidence-based leadership decisions
Through her Power BI and Tableau reporting, Ashley gave HWSETA's management team real-time visibility into system health and testing progress. Deployment decisions shifted from gut feel to data — with dashboards showing exactly what had been tested, what was failing, and what risk remained before release.
Odoo v8 / v12 / v17ERP TestingFunctional Testing
Regression TestingExploratory Testing
Power BITableauAnalytics Reporting
User Access ManagementDefect Tracking
AgileGovernment Sector
The context
This role ran concurrently with Ashley's final year of her BSc in Information Technology — making her simultaneously a full-time student and a contributing member of HWSETA's IT team. The internship was intentionally broad: she was assigned across quality assurance, IT administration, project coordination, and user support — giving her an unusually complete view of how enterprise technology actually operates, from the server room to the boardroom. Most testers spend years building this breadth of system context; Ashley built it in one year while finishing her degree.
Ashley's internship was the foundation on which everything else was built. A multidisciplinary role that combined quality assurance, application testing, IT infrastructure management, project coordination, compliance, and training — simultaneously. The breadth of this experience gives Ashley a systems-level perspective that specialists take years to develop.
Quality assurance & application testing
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Writing and executing test cases
Contributed to the testing phase of ongoing system development projects — writing structured test cases, executing them against defined acceptance criteria, and documenting results in alignment with the organisation's quality standards. Built the foundational habits that define her precision today: every step reproducible, every finding documented, every outcome traceable.
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Quality assurance across the delivery lifecycle
Worked as a quality assurer ensuring products met standards of reliability, usability, and performance — focusing on making sure every delivery was ready for production and met stakeholder expectations. Developed the user-centred quality mindset that distinguishes a skilled tester from someone who just runs test scripts.
IT administration & infrastructure
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IT infrastructure management
Managed and maintained HWSETA's IT infrastructure — ensuring network stability, hardware operation, system uptime, and user access configurations. Understanding the infrastructure layer is a significant advantage for a QA engineer: Ashley knows how environment configuration affects application behaviour, which makes her defect analysis more accurate and her environment-specific test setups more reliable.
Project coordination, compliance & documentation
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Cross-team liaison and coordination
Acted as a liaison between technical teams, management, and end-users — facilitating communication and task coordination across departments for system updates and implementations. This early experience in stakeholder management shapes Ashley's approach today: she automatically considers who needs to know, what they need to understand, and how to say it in a way that moves things forward.
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System documentation and reporting
Maintained comprehensive system documentation — user guides, technical specifications, and process records. Generated and presented reports on system performance, issues, and updates. Documentation discipline is one of the most undervalued QA skills: without good documentation, knowledge lives only in people's heads, and organisations become fragile as team members move on.
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Compliance, security, and end-user training
Ensured system compliance with organisational policies and regulatory requirements, coordinated with IT security teams to mitigate risks, and organised training for staff on new systems. Handling compliance from the inside of an organisation gave Ashley a practical understanding of how security and regulatory requirements translate into system design constraints — knowledge that directly informs her security-conscious approach to testing.
Why this role matters
A full-system perspective
Most QA engineers understand the application layer. Ashley also understands the infrastructure, the compliance environment, the user training challenges, and the stakeholder communication dynamics. This breadth makes her a uniquely valuable contributor on any team.
Discipline under pressure
Managing a multidisciplinary role while completing a BSc degree is not something everyone can do. Ashley did it — graduating on time, getting promoted, and building the foundation for a career in banking-grade automation. That discipline is a permanent character trait, not a temporary circumstance.
The roots of great QA
The habits Ashley developed here — methodical documentation, clear communication, user empathy, compliance awareness — are the habits that distinguish exceptional QA engineers from average ones. They were formed under real pressure, in a real organisation, with real consequences.
Quality AssuranceTest Case WritingIT Administration
System DocumentationProject Coordination
Stakeholder CommunicationCompliance
End-user TrainingSecurity Awareness
Earlier career
Before IT
Even before her technology career, Ashley was building the communication, service, and engagement skills that make a great QA engineer — not just a great tester.
Apr — Aug 2023
Brand Promoter
BetFred via Born-to-Lead (B2L) · Johannesburg
Customer-facing role demonstrating and explaining products to potential customers. Developed strong communication skills, the ability to read an audience, and the confidence to represent a brand under pressure — all of which translate directly into Ashley's ability to present QA findings clearly to diverse stakeholders.
Jan — Mar 2023
Marketing & Brand Ambassador
Richfield Graduate Institute of Technology · Johannesburg
Developed and improved marketing processes to raise student engagement, creating procedures that improved organisational effectiveness. Early experience in process design, a skill that underpins Ashley's approach to designing efficient, scalable test frameworks.
Jan — Mar 2023
Call Centre Agent
Richfield Graduate Institute of Technology · Johannesburg
Managed student accounts, resolved discrepancies, updated records, and coordinated communications between students and academic counsellors. Developed the methodical, accurate, customer-first approach to problem resolution that defines Ashley's defect reporting and stakeholder communication today.