Acafix ApS

Having succesfully improved and extended the existing playwright suite (typescript) for an ever-growing administrative backend portal, I will be available for new contracts after July.

I am interested in everything testing, test management and in particular test automation.

After years of practice I am working as naturally in remote settings as well as in local settings. I am based in Denmark, north of Copenhagen, and am able to do limited travel within EU, Great Britain and the Nordic Countries.

I have 30+ years of experience working as a consultant on developing and testing software. I've been on projects regarding public administration, websites of all kinds, retail, pensions and life insurance, in particular.

Please contact me if you need assistance with any of the roles mentioned above.

AI does not produce inheritently test-free products. On the contrairy we must stay extra observant because we will quickly loose our knowledge of our products otherwise. It is part of the idea with agentic AI software development to not even look at the code, only the result and scores of programmers have already felt that the code base they used to know and had confidence in, is now a stranger to them.

Testing follows along with this, and also need to adjust. We can, in testing, also use agentic AI to help us create automated tests, but importantly, we are needed more than ever to keep the overview and be able to pinpoint the problem areas with regard to how the product behaves.

My background as MSc. in computer technology and more than 30 years of experience in software development has provided me with skills that allows me to write specifications, create models and diagrams for development and of course testing and managing testing in all sorts of projects, including projects with more or less intensive use of AI.

I can work both as tester as well as product owner and architect.

Acafix ApS offers consulting and problem solving and constracting for implementing automation in testing of software.

I have worked with automation and performance testing for years and it is something very close to my heart and passion. As a seasoned programmer (I started programming in 1982 and haven't stopped yet), I often find that I have exactly the skillset necessary to make automation projects succeed.

Fortunately my clients over time agree.

Tools - there have been many. Here are some of those which are still somewhat 'current':

• Playwright
• Cucumber variants:
  • Cucumber / java
  • SpecFlow / C#
  • Behat / PHP
• Leapwork

Once you begin automating parts of the testing, you also begin a new software development project, running in parallel with your product development. The consequences are not always realised in time, especially as various low-code and no-code tools take stage.

You will still need to test your automation. And you need basic maintenance tasks such as having decent versioning, maintaining and updating test data etc. etc.. There. I said it loud.

Testing software does have some quirks that sets it apart from 'product' software. First and foremost it is more important to write readable code, making it easy to understand and maintain. Secondly, as the product keeps evolving, your test code changes along with it, often at higher rate than your product. Keeping everything simple enough to understand, and stay ready to extend and dig deeper, is a bit of an art. OFten the testing code is made to fail, unlike production code which tries everything to survive. But for testing code it is crucial to quickly understand if it is the product, the environment, the data or the testing code itself which is failing.

I can help you with the entire process, whether you are just setting out on this adventure, need a PoC on various tools, or if you just need some extra hands and one more brain to push it over the goal post.

TEST MANAGEMENT

Title description, April 19, 2025

Help, support or right-out test management in large as well as small projects. I have international experience on both project- and program level for test management.

I have had the pleasure of serving as test manager on both small and large international projects. They've all been charming and challenging in each their way.

Test management is first and foremost about communication and precise negotiation of expectations between people inside and outside the project, and on top there is a myriad of technical problems of various sorts to find a solution for.

Waterfall and half-iterative projects

Well, yes, there are still some waterfall projects out there, and I am happy to work on them. With 30+ years of experience I have had my share of waterfall projects prior to the wave of agile projects.

Agile and scrum-ish projects

Some while back I took the scrum-master education, and I've worked in both 'real' scrum project, and all sorts of hybrid forms.

As I see it, the most important thing is to have all agree on what to build, and secondly have all agree to how to build that. As long as everybody is pulling in the same direction and know what to expect of others, the project have the best chances to succeed. I do think that the agile principles are superior to waterfall. They allow us to navigate more precisely and react early as we continue to measure our progress towards the overall goal. This grows the project knowledge base. However, IMHO, many projects are pushed into 'agility' without spending enough time and attention on all of the principles. As if scrum wasn't lightweight enough, some experiment at their own peril at running only with a subset of the method. That typically backfires.

Agile projects also challenge testing, as every sprint needs - at least in principle - to deliver a running, workable new version of the product where everything is tested and checked. Obviously automation in testing is one of the disciplines we turn towards. Keeping the runtime down, maintaining the broken tests (and yes, many are meant to break once we change the product), and still have time to manually test those parts which are either impossible or infeasible to automate, competes every sprint with also building, repairing and extending the platform we build our automation on.

This is however, what I enjoy working with. Helping a team overcome testing problems gives a quite special and joyfull kick.

CONSULTING ON TEST STRATEGY ABD TEST PLANNING.

Title description, April 19, 2025

I have quite a bit of experience in dealing with EU contracts for software development and creating the required testing setup. I have worked in multiple projects both on the consumer and the supplier side.

Contractual lingo is not easy to work with and contains many pitfalls. The purpose is to reach a test strategy which works in practice for that project, not for any project.

Making a test strategy from scratch and creating test plans from it is a bit of an art form.

My services includes of course to take on project management for such a project or program. But I can also work as a mentor or coach for that role, providing some relief and help and advice on how to crunch the problems. Please contact me if you're in need of such assistance.