Richard Henderson

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT RICHARD HENDERSON

Writing this I\'ve realised I\'ve got nearly two decades of experience in the software industry, this makes me feel rather old! Currently enjoying life at Co-Op in Engineering as Lead Quality Coach, working with the Engineering Leadership team to drive how we do quality engineering across our many businesses. I love working with our ever growing Quality Community, it\'s great seeing people come together from all across our different businesses to help each other in their daily challenges and share learnings. I\'m very hands off from day to day software development, but spend a lot of time with our Quality Coaches in helping them learn and grow in their roles, helping to bring consistency to how we do quality engineering team to team.I started out at Co-op in Funeralcare on the colleague facing applications as a quality coach. just like our current hands on quality coaches I was not there to just test developers work, I\'m focused on enabling an effective ‘whole team’ approach to building quality into the development of our products, asking questions about the why, the what and the how.Before Co-op I was at dunnhumby really enjoyed my time working on Pricing and Promotion web apps, I\'d never gotten to work with a data science team which was really great. Some seriously crazy calculations going under the bonnet, great experience in shifting to a more collaborative environment, spending a lot more time sat with developers than some of the places I had worked previously.I spent some time at Rentalcars.com (now Booking.com) working with the Data & Reporting product group. Got my hands dirty setting up a new Cucumber test automation suite using Groovy, taking the lead on that was an interesting challenge and something I really enjoyed driving. Worked on some great products including some that tracked user behaviour to help us better fulfil user needs.The core of my hands on test experience comes from working as a test analyst at Sage (UK) Ltd, spending over eleven years with the company, nine of these in the technology/engineering department. I worked my way from their software support team, where I worked with their corporation tax software, before moving to the technology department as a test analyst to start my journey in testing and quality. It was quite a journey to start out working on desktop apps, which required physical networks being set up, to test them to finishing my time there in the online app world. I do not miss the world of installation testing and blue progress bars in an ice cold room!