Michelle Kidby

Software Development Engineer in Test

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.

  1. Lead SDET

    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.

  2. Lead Automation Engineer

    2018

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

  3. QA Automation Engineer

    2017

    Developed browser plugins enabling E2E automation to run on Staging without server interruptions.

  4. QA Automation Engineer

    2016

    Built a test framework for validating data sets migrated between SQL and Mongo databases.

  5. QA Automation Engineer

    2015

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

  6. QA Engineer

    2014

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

  7. Software Test Engineer

    2013

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

  8. QA Engineer

    2012

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

  9. QA Engineer Intern

    2011

    Wrote stored procedures for data validation across SQL databases.