evomedia.netPrincipal Software QA Engineer / Senior QA Engineer — Autodesk (2006–2026)
Releases and CI
- Took part in the release Go/No-Go calls, and sat on the nomination committee that decided, after the code-freeze milestone, whether a defect or feature was important enough to re-spin a new build.
- Did all of the daily 3ds Max builds, and owned the 3ds Max beta release cycle and the Python release-automation repository: set it up, got it running and maintained it, and wrote a lot of its code alongside other developers.
- Built, by hand in Python and PowerShell, a hands-off nightly 3ds Max beta release: release notes from Jira, Turbo virtualization, publishing through Centercode's API, delivery on Akamai and later Amazon S3. The full story.
- Built the automated defect loop for the beta program: reports went into Jira through its API, were routed by feature to the QA engineer who owned it, and were closed on Centercode by a Jira trigger that sent the notes back to the beta user. The full story.
- Built Python and PowerShell automation and API testing tools in Jenkins pipelines with Artifactory, and authored and maintained the Jenkinsfiles for over ten years.
- Set up Jira Xray for regression testing, used Zephyr as well, and owned the 3ds Max Animation Regression Suite; worked with Jira, Confluence and Workday through their APIs and webhooks.
AI MotionMaker and the Autodesk ML Toolkit
- Core QA for AI MotionMaker, a deep-learning Maya feature, and the Autodesk ML Toolkit from first development through production release, testing all of the toolkit and Maya's AI features on Windows and Linux.
- Supported executive demo readiness for AI MotionMaker at TechX 2025, presented by Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost. The product earned the Customer Experience Award at TechX 2026, and Fast Company named it to its 2026 Next Big Things in Tech list.
The beta program
- On the small corporate team of system-wide Centercode administrators for all of Autodesk's beta programs; owned the Media & Entertainment beta process, and was Beta Program Manager for 3ds Max and Maya.
- Wrote the complete beta-program runbook on the internal wiki, every detail with screenshots, so anyone could fill in with no prior knowledge.
QA on 3ds Max and Maya
- Senior QA engineer on Maya and 3ds Max, under the QA manager, across continuous two-week sprints: test plans, regression strategies and validation matrices, risk-based planning, and each release's test schedule and risks; owned the defect lifecycle end to end.
- Worked on nearly every 3ds Max feature with its developer, implementing, reviewing and verifying fixes in local C++/MFC/SDK builds; generally the one on the QA team the others came to, on that experience.
- With Christopher Diggins, worked on the Python integration in 3ds Max from prototypes to first customer download: he wrote the C++; I tested the integration, did the UX and the QA, created the shipping demos, and reviewed the docs and examples.
- Built an 8-GPU render-test server, on a Cubix GPU expansion backplane with NVIDIA Tesla and Quadro cards.
- Tested 3ds Max rendering on a 256-CPU high-performance computing machine: core-count testing of multi-threading support and utilization, and stress testing.
- Initial QA lead on the 3ds Max water simulation system (computational fluid dynamics); initial testing of the Nitrous graphics system.
- Built the first IPv6 lab for the Media & Entertainment division's network rendering system, and a prototype computational fluid dynamics system for measuring airflow inside stadiums from real-time wind-sensor data.
- Agile throughout, partnering with engineering, product, UX and release teams across continuous two-week sprint cycles.
Everything here in full, and the earlier work, on the Autodesk Work page.