Principal QE Architect at QA Approved — Quebec Inc.
Montreal, Canada
Vitaly Skadorva
Council Member
Vitaly Skadorva serves as Principal QE Architect across multiple contract engagements through QA Approved while simultaneously holding a Principal Test Automation Developer role at Intact Financial Corporation, bringing more than fifteen years of experience building test automation infrastructure across financial services, e-commerce, media, and artificial intelligence sectors from his base in Canada.
Since October 2022, Vitaly Skadorva has worked as Principal Test Automation Developer at Intact Financial Corporation in Ottawa, where he redesigned framework architecture across multiple products and reduced regression runtime from five hours to thirty minutes. He migrated existing Java and Selenium tests to Cypress, improving execution speed and reliability, and introduced component-level testing for React and Angular components using Cypress to catch defects earlier and reduce the scope of end-to-end tests needed. He architected and standardized Cypress frameworks across multiple products covering configuration, fixtures, custom commands, CI pipelines, and reporting, and built a Playwright framework for the Self-Serve platform to handle mobile web scenarios, device emulation, and cross-browser coverage. He integrated Cucumber into the Cypress framework to support behavior-driven development and wired Cypress into GitHub Actions so automated tests run on every code change. He maintained the Java, Cucumber, and REST Assured backend testing framework for API coverage and added Axe Core accessibility checks against WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 directly into the test suite. He introduced visual regression testing to catch UI inconsistencies across releases, ran bi-weekly Cypress workshops for QA colleagues, and began shifting the testing architecture toward AI-assisted practices by integrating Claude Code and GitHub Copilot into the development workflow for test authoring and code review, configuring agents and skills, and exploring agentic orchestration to reduce manual overhead at the framework level.
Since October 2021, Vitaly Skadorva has operated as Principal QE Architect through his independent consulting corporation QA Approved, working with clients including Intact, Ericsson Canada, National Bank of Canada, Ridgeline Apps, Scholastic, Monster.com, TapHero, and BRP. His work covered manual and automated testing across web and mobile platforms, where for critical releases he ran exploratory and regression testing manually, and for automation he designed and built frameworks using Cypress, Playwright, Selenium, Cucumber, and REST Assured connected to CI/CD pipelines via Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Bitbucket, and GitLab. On larger engagements, this included multi-country, multi-brand, multi-language, and multi-viewport framework architecture, pipeline parallelization for CI cost and time optimization, hybrid Cypress and Playwright setups for mobile and Safari coverage, API automation for REST and GraphQL, payment and checkout integration flows for Stripe and Braintree, and custom accessibility reporting built around compliance requirements. His accessibility testing using Axe and WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 ran inside the pipeline across multiple engagements rather than as separate audits. On the strategy side, he worked with product owners and business analysts to build test plans from requirements, supported QA hiring, and ran workshops to help engineering teams adopt automation incrementally, while using Claude Code and GitHub Copilot for test authoring and code review with agentic workflows for test orchestration.
From May 2021 to October 2022, Vitaly Skadorva served as Lead QA Automation Engineer at Diamond Web Services, working across multiple client engagements simultaneously and building test automation frameworks tailored to each product's stack and testing needs for clients including FX Networks, Wondery (Amazon Music), and Nudj Health. His work covered end-to-end, component, API, backend, UI, mobile, and security testing, where for each client he designed framework architecture from scratch, defined the CI/CD regression strategy across Dev, QA, and Staging environments, and ensured full pipeline integration. He built Cypress frameworks for end-to-end and React component testing across all three products, developed mobile test automation for React Native applications with BrowserStack for cross-browser and cross-device coverage, implemented API testing with GraphQL and authentication flows using AWS Cognito, added Axe Core accessibility testing against WCAG 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2 at levels A, AA, and AAA, covered security scenarios including cross-access validation using auth tokens, and reduced regression execution time from two days to one hour across client projects.
Since October 2022, Vitaly Skadorva has worked as Principal Test Automation Developer at Intact Financial Corporation in Ottawa, where he redesigned framework architecture across multiple products and reduced regression runtime from five hours to thirty minutes. He migrated existing Java and Selenium tests to Cypress, improving execution speed and reliability, and introduced component-level testing for React and Angular components using Cypress to catch defects earlier and reduce the scope of end-to-end tests needed. He architected and standardized Cypress frameworks across multiple products covering configuration, fixtures, custom commands, CI pipelines, and reporting, and built a Playwright framework for the Self-Serve platform to handle mobile web scenarios, device emulation, and cross-browser coverage. He integrated Cucumber into the Cypress framework to support behavior-driven development and wired Cypress into GitHub Actions so automated tests run on every code change. He maintained the Java, Cucumber, and REST Assured backend testing framework for API coverage and added Axe Core accessibility checks against WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 directly into the test suite. He introduced visual regression testing to catch UI inconsistencies across releases, ran bi-weekly Cypress workshops for QA colleagues, and began shifting the testing architecture toward AI-assisted practices by integrating Claude Code and GitHub Copilot into the development workflow for test authoring and code review, configuring agents and skills, and exploring agentic orchestration to reduce manual overhead at the framework level.
Since October 2021, Vitaly Skadorva has operated as Principal QE Architect through his independent consulting corporation QA Approved, working with clients including Intact, Ericsson Canada, National Bank of Canada, Ridgeline Apps, Scholastic, Monster.com, TapHero, and BRP. His work covered manual and automated testing across web and mobile platforms, where for critical releases he ran exploratory and regression testing manually, and for automation he designed and built frameworks using Cypress, Playwright, Selenium, Cucumber, and REST Assured connected to CI/CD pipelines via Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Bitbucket, and GitLab. On larger engagements, this included multi-country, multi-brand, multi-language, and multi-viewport framework architecture, pipeline parallelization for CI cost and time optimization, hybrid Cypress and Playwright setups for mobile and Safari coverage, API automation for REST and GraphQL, payment and checkout integration flows for Stripe and Braintree, and custom accessibility reporting built around compliance requirements. His accessibility testing using Axe and WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 ran inside the pipeline across multiple engagements rather than as separate audits. On the strategy side, he worked with product owners and business analysts to build test plans from requirements, supported QA hiring, and ran workshops to help engineering teams adopt automation incrementally, while using Claude Code and GitHub Copilot for test authoring and code review with agentic workflows for test orchestration.
From May 2021 to October 2022, Vitaly Skadorva served as Lead QA Automation Engineer at Diamond Web Services, working across multiple client engagements simultaneously and building test automation frameworks tailored to each product's stack and testing needs for clients including FX Networks, Wondery (Amazon Music), and Nudj Health. His work covered end-to-end, component, API, backend, UI, mobile, and security testing, where for each client he designed framework architecture from scratch, defined the CI/CD regression strategy across Dev, QA, and Staging environments, and ensured full pipeline integration. He built Cypress frameworks for end-to-end and React component testing across all three products, developed mobile test automation for React Native applications with BrowserStack for cross-browser and cross-device coverage, implemented API testing with GraphQL and authentication flows using AWS Cognito, added Axe Core accessibility testing against WCAG 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2 at levels A, AA, and AAA, covered security scenarios including cross-access validation using auth tokens, and reduced regression execution time from two days to one hour across client projects.
From January 2020 to May 2021, Vitaly Skadorva worked as Senior QA Automation Developer at Collective[i] in Montreal, where he built Cypress automation frameworks from scratch covering end-to-end, API, backend, and UI testing. He set up Postman and Newman for API test automation and integrated both into the regression suite, configured CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins and the internal data center to run automated tests on every change, and developed ETL pipeline testing to validate data extraction, transformation, and loading across system boundaries.
From December 2018 to January 2020, Vitaly Skadorva served as QA Lead at Stradigi AI in Montreal, where he joined as the first QA hire and built the entire QA function from scratch covering strategy, processes, tooling, team, and CI/CD integration across all test levels. He designed and implemented testing for an AI-first platform by validating AI model outputs, testing the infrastructure built on top of those models, and covering the UI that allowed Data Scientists to build and configure AI pipelines end-to-end. He wrote and documented the test strategy and testing standards adopted across all SCRUM teams, hired and embedded QA engineers directly into development squads, and built automation frameworks for end-to-end, API, and UI testing from the ground up. He expanded test coverage to include non-functional testing covering security, performance, database, accessibility, and localization, established a Bug Triage Committee to systematically prioritize and track defects, worked with the DevOps team to configure CI/CD pipelines and with Solution Architects to define standards for unit and integration testing, and led the company through external audits that achieved ISO 25001 and ISO 24001 certification.
From March 2018 to December 2018, Vitaly Skadorva held the position of Principal QA Developer at OneSpan, formerly eSignLive by VASCO, in Montreal, serving as QA lead for a web-based SaaS and on-premise application covering manual and automated testing across browsers and mobile devices. He built and maintained automated test suites using Java, Selenium, and REST Assured for frontend, API, and backend coverage, tested backend Java builds and databases including SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, and DB2, and conducted API, white-box, and black-box testing against both SaaS and on-premise deployments. He defined the test strategy as the foundation for overall test coverage and introduced a standardized bug report template, established a Quality Assistance approach that shifted QA involvement earlier in the development cycle, improved pre-release testing processes to catch regressions before they reached production, and served as hiring manager for the SQA team where he ran interviews and designed and graded technical assessments.
From August 2016 to March 2018, Vitaly Skadorva worked as Quality Assurance Specialist at Yellow Pages Canada in Montreal, handling QA responsibilities for web applications used by the Sales and Marketing departments and covering both testing and frontend development. He built Page Object Model frameworks from scratch for each project using Python, Java, TypeScript, JavaScript, Jasmine, Protractor, and Selenium, covered frontend, backend, white-box, and black-box testing with regression runs every sprint using automated test scripts, tested user stories and acceptance criteria against business requirements, contributed to Angular feature development alongside QA responsibilities, and reduced regression execution time from seven hours to thirty minutes through framework optimization and JavaScript injection techniques in Protractor.
From August 2014 to August 2016, Vitaly Skadorva served as e-Commerce Software Tester at Equipements Sport Metro Inc. in Montreal, where he tested an e-commerce Magento platform focused on validating product listing transfers to Amazon and eBay at a volume of more than one hundred listings per day. He automated listing quality validation using Selenium and REST Assured to catch transfer errors at scale.
Since 2016, Vitaly Skadorva has developed and applied an original approach to test automation architecture by decomposing complex test suites into independent layers that execute in parallel, replacing slow and fragile end-to-end tests with multi-level coverage running in milliseconds. He formalized this into a schematic architectural model that both developers and testers can work with and applied it across organizations including Intact Financial Corporation, BRP, Collective[i], OneSpan, and Yellow Pages, consistently reducing regression runtimes by eighty-five to ninety-five percent.
From December 2018 to January 2020, Vitaly Skadorva served as QA Lead at Stradigi AI in Montreal, where he joined as the first QA hire and built the entire QA function from scratch covering strategy, processes, tooling, team, and CI/CD integration across all test levels. He designed and implemented testing for an AI-first platform by validating AI model outputs, testing the infrastructure built on top of those models, and covering the UI that allowed Data Scientists to build and configure AI pipelines end-to-end. He wrote and documented the test strategy and testing standards adopted across all SCRUM teams, hired and embedded QA engineers directly into development squads, and built automation frameworks for end-to-end, API, and UI testing from the ground up. He expanded test coverage to include non-functional testing covering security, performance, database, accessibility, and localization, established a Bug Triage Committee to systematically prioritize and track defects, worked with the DevOps team to configure CI/CD pipelines and with Solution Architects to define standards for unit and integration testing, and led the company through external audits that achieved ISO 25001 and ISO 24001 certification.
From March 2018 to December 2018, Vitaly Skadorva held the position of Principal QA Developer at OneSpan, formerly eSignLive by VASCO, in Montreal, serving as QA lead for a web-based SaaS and on-premise application covering manual and automated testing across browsers and mobile devices. He built and maintained automated test suites using Java, Selenium, and REST Assured for frontend, API, and backend coverage, tested backend Java builds and databases including SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, and DB2, and conducted API, white-box, and black-box testing against both SaaS and on-premise deployments. He defined the test strategy as the foundation for overall test coverage and introduced a standardized bug report template, established a Quality Assistance approach that shifted QA involvement earlier in the development cycle, improved pre-release testing processes to catch regressions before they reached production, and served as hiring manager for the SQA team where he ran interviews and designed and graded technical assessments.
From August 2016 to March 2018, Vitaly Skadorva worked as Quality Assurance Specialist at Yellow Pages Canada in Montreal, handling QA responsibilities for web applications used by the Sales and Marketing departments and covering both testing and frontend development. He built Page Object Model frameworks from scratch for each project using Python, Java, TypeScript, JavaScript, Jasmine, Protractor, and Selenium, covered frontend, backend, white-box, and black-box testing with regression runs every sprint using automated test scripts, tested user stories and acceptance criteria against business requirements, contributed to Angular feature development alongside QA responsibilities, and reduced regression execution time from seven hours to thirty minutes through framework optimization and JavaScript injection techniques in Protractor.
From August 2014 to August 2016, Vitaly Skadorva served as e-Commerce Software Tester at Equipements Sport Metro Inc. in Montreal, where he tested an e-commerce Magento platform focused on validating product listing transfers to Amazon and eBay at a volume of more than one hundred listings per day. He automated listing quality validation using Selenium and REST Assured to catch transfer errors at scale.
Since 2016, Vitaly Skadorva has developed and applied an original approach to test automation architecture by decomposing complex test suites into independent layers that execute in parallel, replacing slow and fragile end-to-end tests with multi-level coverage running in milliseconds. He formalized this into a schematic architectural model that both developers and testers can work with and applied it across organizations including Intact Financial Corporation, BRP, Collective[i], OneSpan, and Yellow Pages, consistently reducing regression runtimes by eighty-five to ninety-five percent.