About
I’m Ben. I build the systems that catch the bugs.
Senior QA Engineer at Xplor Technologies, where I architect Playwright automation for a high-volume payment platform and build AI agents that turn Jira epics into test plans and specs.
Lincoln, NE
10+ years in QA
Payments
Playwright / JS
Claude Code agents
Path
Where I’ve been
2023 – now
Xplor Technologies
Senior QA Engineer
Architected a Playwright/JavaScript E2E framework from scratch for a high-volume payment platform. QA lead on a Kanban team.
2022 – 2023
Early Warning
Software Developer in Test
Tested SOAP services in SoapUI and designed a proof of concept for automating them. A short stint that sharpened my API testing and pushed me toward building frameworks of my own.
2019 – 2022
Ameritas
Lead QA Analyst
Built a Postman framework, then a Rest-Assured framework to replace it. UI automation in Groovy, Geb, and Spock.
2012 – 2019
MacPractice
QA Technical Lead
Owned the build system, mentored the team, and brought in Selenium, Cucumber, and Postman/Newman in GitLab CI.
Now
What I work on
Framework architecture
20+ API service clients, 100+ JSON schema validators, a modular helper structure, and one polling abstraction instead of scattered async waits.
Payment edge cases
Reversals, refunds, token migration, and race conditions in concurrent transactions. The bugs that only show up when two requests land at once.
AI test generation
Claude Code + Playwright agents that turn a Jira epic into one de-duplicated test strategy, then plan and generate specs. Shared across QA repos as a plugin.
QA leadership
Developer collaboration, offshore alignment, and Jira, Zephyr, and Xray test tracking on a Kanban team.
Principles
How I work
01
When a stack isn’t working, I replace it. When a pattern is wrong, I fix it.
02
Tests should fail loudly. Asserting what you saw instead of what should happen is worse than no test.
03
Code-enforced guarantees beat conventions, and I’m honest about which one I’m relying on.
04
If the automation problem is interesting, I’m probably already thinking about it.
Off the clock
The rest
Dad and husband in Lincoln, Nebraska. When I’m not breaking software on purpose, I’m into locksport: picking locks for fun, which turns out to be the same instinct as testing. Find how it’s built, find where it gives.
B.S. in Management Information Systems from Bellevue University, after studying Computer Software Engineering at Iowa State.