Daniel Wilson Daniel Wilson DanielWilson

CP1 · Testing, 2009 to now

Seventeen years of making quality easy

I started on games at SEGA and have spent most of the years since in finance and insurance, where a bug costs real people real money.

Now · Test coach at Simply Business since 2019 · Jump ahead

Quality is everyone's responsibility.

Quality should be part of how a team works, not a department you call when something breaks. So I build test tooling that makes the right thing the easy thing, and I mentor test engineers to raise the bar for their whole team.

1. 2009 · BA (Hons) Digital Music & Computer Games Design, 2:1

2. 20092009

   SEGA Europe

   Functionality Tester · Chiswick

   Testing AAA games through pre-alpha, alpha and beta, straight out of university.

   More

   • Daily test and feedback reports for several external development studios.
   • Software and hardware environment management.
   • Writing and maintaining test scripts.

3. 2011

   Software Quality Systems

   Consultant · Moorgate

   Home Retail Group: the Argos digital browser that replaced the in-store catalogues, worth over £16m a year in savings.

   More

   • Three weeks in South Africa learning to test properly, an ISTQB Foundation, then out to clients.
   • Gala Coral: a revenue protection system that flagged cash discrepancies to head office.
   • Rated "Excellent", with 100% positive client feedback.

4. 2011 · ISTQB Foundation (CTFL)

5. 2012

   Think Finance

   Test Analyst · Covent Garden

   Underwriting and verification on quid.co.uk and sunny.co.uk. They liked the consultancy work enough to hire me.

   More

   • Test scripts for system integration, UAT and offshore regression.
   • Agile testing with TDD, BDD and Scrumban.
   • Out of hours support, evenings, weekends and bank holidays.

6. 2014

   Oakam

   Contract Lead Test Analyst · Tottenham Court Road

   Keeping a lender FCA compliant through the rate cap, affordability checks and redress.

   More

   • Validated loan calculation outputs for FCA compliance.
   • Wrote the white papers that introduced defect, regression and reporting processes.

7. 2015

   Elevate

   Contract Senior QA · Covent Garden

   sunny.co.uk across three teams: payments, customer experience and risk. Team of the Year 2015.

   More

   • Managed six to eight offshore testers across two teams.
   • Regression automation with Selenium IDE.
   • Interviewed junior and senior QA analysts.

8. 2015 · ISTQB Intermediate (ICST) · 2016 · BCS Business Analysis (FCBA)

9. 2017

   Cabot Credit Management

   Contract QA Lead · Brackley

   A re-platforming that brought several businesses onto one system. I trained 15 business users to run UAT.

   More

   • Coordinated system, integration and user acceptance testing.
   • Tested Direct Debit, AUDDIS and BACS files so repayments migrated correctly.
   • Kept the migration PCI-DSS and FCA compliant.

10. 2017

    Connells Group

    Senior Test Analyst · Dunstable

    Led four test analysts and helped the move from Waterfall to Agile.

    More

    • connells.co.uk, sequence.co.uk, hatched.co.uk and a company-wide Windows 10 upgrade.
    • Made the case for, and introduced, cross-browser and cross-device testing tools.

11. 2018

    NewDay

    Credit Risk Testing Specialist · King's Cross

    Decision systems for Aqua, Fluid, Amazon, Argos and more. Shipped defects went from three per release to one a year.

    More

    • Embedded in the credit risk team, implementing new decision strategies.
    • Key out of hours contact for Experian and Provenir.

12. 2019 to now

    Simply Business

    Senior Software Test Engineer (test coach) · Moorgate

    I own code quality for a squad building self-serve policy management for UK and US customers, and maintain the internal test tooling around 90 engineers across 15 teams use every day. A policy takes 20 seconds through it, instead of about 5 minutes through the frontend.

    How I use AI. Most of my routine quality work now starts with Claude or Copilot: drafting test plans and cases from the ticket and the code, opening pull requests, and running first-pass reviews. I read and check everything it produces, and the decisions stay mine: what's worth testing, what done means, and whether it ships. It's also what my next book is about.

    More

    • Top contributor to the company-wide testing tools repo: policies, backdated policies and customer accounts without touching the frontend.
    • An AI-first way of working with Claude and Copilot for test plans, cases, pull requests and reviews.
    • Mentored mid-level test engineers for around five years, and run the fortnightly test council.
    • Interviewed junior, mid-level and senior test engineers for UK and US roles.
    • Own the BrowserStack relationship; introduced cross-browser and cross-device testing, and wrote Cypress end-to-end scripts for the repetitive checks.
    • Scribe on several major incidents. Team of the Year 2019.
    • Ruby on Rails, React, AWS, Docker, Jenkins, New Relic, Cypress and BrowserStack.
13. 

    2025

    The Book On Software Testing: A Guide for Non‑Testers

    A jargon-free guide for the Product Owners, Project Managers, Business Analysts and developers who work with testers.

    ★★★★★

    Really helps to understand what software testing is all about.

    Buy it on Amazon

14. Now

    Writing and community

    Drafting Signal & Noise: Software Testing in the Age of AI, around 70,000 words in: how testing changes when code is written with AI.

    Elected moderator on the Software Quality Assurance & Testing Stack Exchange.

Download CV (PDF)

CP2 · Little Oceans

I build websites for small businesses

Little Oceans is my web studio in Bedfordshire. Every site is hand-coded, fast, and looked after once it's live.

I also built and run Insound, a direct-to-fan music platform: Next.js, Supabase, Cloudflare Workers and Stripe Connect, from first commit to production incidents.

For a few clients I built lo-edit, a small in-page editor that lets them change their own wording without a CMS or a call to me. A Cloudflare Worker and D1 database, behind Cloudflare Access, with unit tests and Playwright checks.

See more at Little Oceans

CP3 · Running

Ultras, ideally over mountains

Also on the list: a duathlon, a 10-hour Peloton ride and several 24-hour gaming marathons, the last two for charity. Over £4,000 raised so far.