From boardrooms to bug hunters, I unpack how testing and the SDLC evolve. Three decades operating across software quality, dev tools, and the capital that funds them — most recently as Chief Community Advocate at Katalon, reporting to the CEO. Today I’m building Phaeto, Codemoor, and Checkmoor, running 400,000+ practitioners across a dozen-plus user groups, and shipping agentic engineering inside a modern enterprise.
The career arc that informs every recommendation I make. Operator on the inside at Katalon, Sabre, Cytracom, and SensorLogic. Founder of Rouge Advisory (17 years) and QAJuice. Advisor to roughly 20 venture funds and the testing companies in their portfolios.
Building agentic software engineering practices into a modern engineering organization. Designing AI agents, RAG systems, and autonomous workflows — LLMs, vector databases, contextual retrieval — to accelerate engineering delivery and quality.
Ran the Katalon Community. Advised Product and Marketing while infusing Community-Led Growth into the GTM strategy. 367% community growth during tenure; 105,000 members. Launched Katalon Academy, Discourse Forum, Education Program, and the Creator (Ambassador) Program.
SDLC improvement targeted at customer retention. Inherited a 17.8% monthly churn rate; stabilized at 0.0023.
End-to-end testing and development across Airline Solutions. Oversight of all software testing tool acquisitions at Sabre, 2015–2019. Built international teams from scratch across Bangalore, New York, and Dallas. Shipped an internal AI-as-a-Service automation framework for E2E.
VC-backed Platform-as-a-Service in IoT. Successful acquisition exit to Gemalto. Day-to-day leadership in a startup environment.
Selected clients: Applitools, Sauce Labs, Testim, Test Rigor, Perforce, Tricentis, Karate Labs, Katalon, Test Guild, Techwell, Druid AI, Yum Brands, JCP, T-Mobile, BCBS, TravelPort — plus roughly 20 venture funds.
Quality consultancy. Fortune 100 clients including DFW Airport, Pizza Hut, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, CenturyTel.
Led QA, production support, and development teams for Fortune 100 clients. Sold $18M+ in solution work. Designed and presented enterprise solutions.
Implementation of POS systems for country clubs. Onsite configurations, quality management of release software, database maintenance.
International Software Testing Qualifications Board
Four products, the advisory firm, and the podcast — the platforms I use to stay current with the practitioners and the founders building what comes next.
The whole application lifecycle on one modern platform. Checkmoor brings plan, build, test, release, tracking and insight together as Modern, Agentic Application Lifecycle Management: AI agents work alongside your team, and every module is optional, so you can use Checkmoor’s or connect Jira, GitHub, Linear and Azure DevOps and mix and match.
Version control without Git. Auto-save, AI-agent attribution, and one-click undo on every change — no terminal, no commands to learn. Built for the founders, designers, and engineers shipping software through Claude Code, Cursor, and any MCP-compatible agent.
Don’t just drive through a state. Experience it.
Roam is for getting out and actually seeing a state — its college towns and campuses, its trails and parks, its main streets, museums, and landmarks, and the things that make one corner of it different from the next.
Tours built for where you are. More than a thousand ready-made tours, each shaped around what that area is known for — campus walks and college-town stops, film and TV locations, food, music, and ghost stories, coastlines and ranch country, battlefields and the ghost towns nobody puts on a list. Start one and it guides you stop to stop, narrating each as you arrive — and every place on the map can be read aloud too, so you can listen with your eyes on the road.
Nearly 9,000 trails. Walking, running, and riding — from a quick loop through town to an all-day state-park hike — mapped alongside everything else, so a morning on the trail and an afternoon in town are the same plan.
Free to explore, built to go deeper. The map, every place on it, and check-ins — climb the ranks and watch a state fill in county by county — are free. Tours and trails are the subscription: a free flagship in each area to start, and the full library with a subscription.
Same engine, one state at a time, each built from that state’s own public records and open trail data. iOS + web.
What’s on the map · three states
Tours cover college towns, film locations, food, music, the outdoors, and the stories each region tells about itself — narrated stop by stop.
AI resume tailoring paired with warm-signal intelligence. Phaeto rewrites your resume against the posting and surfaces the warmest person in your network who can get it in front of a real human. iOS + web. Built it for a friend who’d just lost their job.
Boutique advisory for SDLC and dev-tools companies and the capital that backs them. Product, GTM, community-led growth, and operator-grade investor diligence. 17 years, including Applitools, Sauce Labs, Testim, Perforce, and Katalon among the names.
How I work →A dozen-plus LinkedIn user groups across testing, automation, and the modern SDLC — including the largest Selenium community on LinkedIn. This is where the testing market actually talks.
Senior engineers, QA leaders, automation architects, dev managers. Almost no one selling into this audience can reach them directly. The community is how I do it — and how the dev-tools companies I advise reach the market that matters to them.
Industry analysis on capital flows in testing, where the SDLC is headed, and how AI is reshaping how software gets built, tested, and shipped.
Founders, technical leaders, and investors on where testing, dev tooling, and AI-assisted software development are actually going.
Personal video shout-outs to Modern Software and the work we do across the community.
A representative slice of 25+ written recommendations on LinkedIn spanning 2008–2025. Notably from people who were senior to me and direct managers — not just peers.
Mike created and ran our End-to-End Quality Management practice for our Sabre Airline Solutions Business Unit — a unique and highly technical team built to show us the technical health of all our AS product portfolios with deep expertise in the Airline IT industry. He’s a capable leader. He combines Tech, People, and Strategy into building a culture. I would gladly work with Mike again.
Mike is one of a kind — a genuine and caring leader. His strong intuition for leadership is compounded by a deep knowledge of Q/A, engineering infrastructure, and Agile methodologies. I worked with Mike at Cytracom and he immediately brought clarity to our teams, energy to our Q/A program, and was a breath of fresh air from an engineering standpoint. I highly recommend Mike if you need a focused and empathetic leader in your engineering program.
Under Mike’s leadership, the group has become the go-to destination for test automation professionals. He played a vital role in helping us promote our events to a wider audience, resulting in thousands of attendees worldwide. His professionalism, expertise, and commitment to excellence are truly inspiring.
I had the pleasure of working with Mike for 3 years while I was at Testim. Mike has built a large and engaged LinkedIn Selenium group where we worked closely to develop thought leadership campaigns to build trust within the software quality community. From evaluating product capabilities to proofreading material, Mike’s experience as an SME was invaluable to our campaigns’ success.
The Last Champion (2020)
The Madison (Season 2)
Lawmen: Bass Reeves
Texas-based, working globally.
The easiest way to reach me is LinkedIn.