# Michelle Kidby

> Software Development Engineer in Test. Frameworks, AI-driven QE tooling, CI/CD.

I am a Software Development Engineer in Test with over 15 years of experience.

My passion is creating frameworks from scratch to provide full-stack coverage with a shift-left approach.

I am currently building autonomous AI-driven tools to maintain quality gates in CI. The purpose is to sustain efficient continuous testing in CI/CD that surfaces meaningful bugs with detailed and timely test reports. This is multifaceted and requires an orchestrated solution for full-stack coverage.

My leadership style is to lead from the front line. I build the hard parts myself and set the standard in the work, and I make that standard extensible so the team that owns it can carry it forward.

I create custom internal tools and test frameworks to resolve problems and blockers, helping Engineering work more efficiently. From there I partner closely with Engineers to drive buy-in and provide ongoing support.

Aside from technology, I enjoy playing music and spending time with my husband.

## Links

- [Home](https://kidby.dev/)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/kidby)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-k-71864548/)

## Timeline

### Lead SDET (2019 – Present)

- **2026**: Led an engineering initiative to implement quality gates across CI/CD (pre-commit, push, pre-release, post-deploy). Built test framework support per test type for the gates: static, unit, visual regression, DAST, SAST, E2E, load, monitoring.
- **2025**: Developed an autonomous AI bug triage agent that runs in CI/CD, triaging test failures, reporting bugs, and repairing tests.
- **2024**: Developed an automated security test framework for DAST and deployed it on Google Cloud.
- **2023**: Unified mobile testing into a single framework with Playwright, WebDriver, Appium, and XCUITest for automated native app test runs in CI.
- **2022**: Ran distributed load tests on Artillery + AWS Fargate to validate a successful Apache → NGINX migration.
- **2021**: Designed a functional test framework in Playwright + TypeScript and extended it across 5 applications.
- **2020**: Built an internal desktop API testing tool in Electron.
- **2019**: Established a functional test framework in Cypress + TypeScript for a web-based LMS.

### Lead Automation Engineer (2018 – 2019)

- **2018**: Engineered an automated test framework for OEM hardware OS deployment on devices running eye-tracking software.

### QA Automation Engineer (2017 – 2018)

- **2017**: Developed browser plugins enabling E2E automation to run on Staging without server interruptions.

### QA Automation Engineer (2016 – 2017)

- **2016**: Built a test framework for validating data sets migrated between SQL and Mongo databases.

### QA Automation Engineer (2015 – 2016)

- **2015**: Created an E2E test-data generation tool in Java + Selenium for checkout-cart flow and inventory delivery tracking.

### QA Engineer (2014 – 2015)

- **2014**: Developed a native-mobile-app test framework using pytest and Selenium.

### Software Test Engineer (2013)

- **2013**: Built an E2E test framework in C# + Selenium for WebMD's web applications.

### QA Engineer (2012 – 2013)

- **2012**: Established an E2E test framework in C# + Selenium and trained the QA team to write tests with it.

### QA Engineer Intern (2011 – 2012)

- **2011**: Wrote stored procedures for data validation across SQL databases.