Michelle Chua - Lagare
Director of Quality Engineering
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About
Quality Assurance and Quality Engineering executive with 22+ years leading enterprise test strategy, automation, quality governance, production validation, and organisational transformation across regulated fintech, banking, digital channels, healthcare, government, gaming, and global enterprise environments.
Former
Head of Quality Engineering at Maya, leading a 38-person organisation through three people managers across multiple financial-services business lines. Proven in scaling QA/QE functions, establishing quality gates and metrics, balancing manual, automated, exploratory, performance, integration, and security testing, and advising executives on product risk and release readiness. Experienced in shift-left and shift-right practices, Selenium and TestRail adoption, Jira administration, production performance validation, monitoring governance, and cross-functional partnership with Engineering, Product, Operations, DevOps, and NOC teams.
Experience
QE 360 — Founder & President Nov 2018 – Present
Quality Engineering consultancy serving banking, fintech, healthcare, government, gaming, and enterprise clients across the Philippines, US, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, India, and Russia.
Define and operationalise enterprise QA/QE strategies, testing standards, quality gates, metrics, release controls, and readiness reporting across complex client programmes and delivery streams.
Advise CIOs, CTOs, and VPs of Engineering on quality operating models, automation architecture, framework and tool selection, workflow improvement, organisational capability, delivery risk, and release priorities.
Lead cross-functional alignment among Product, Engineering, DevOps, Operations, Governance, Risk, Security, business stakeholders, and vendors to resolve bottlenecks and improve delivery flow.
Build organisational capability through coaching, training, and structured practice uplift; hired 25 full-time professionals and 34 associates/interns and trained or mentored 300+ QEs, testers, business analysts, and technology practitioners.
Own P&L, business strategy, financial planning, hiring, performance management, contract negotiation, vendor management, resource allocation, and consulting delivery.
Set product vision for AIQE, an AI-powered test-automation platform designed to reduce test authoring, execution, and reporting effort.
Extend and maintain client Selenium automation suites where established frameworks are already in place, preserving continuity while increasing automated coverage and maintainability.
SELECTED TRANSFORMATION OUTCOMES
International Gaming Fintech — Agile Delivery, Release Governance & Global Capability
Standardised QE practices across 15 international offices through one enterprise test playbook adopted by approximately 40 QA/QE practitioners; acted as the accountable interface to the VP of Engineering for quality strategy, risk, standards, and release readiness.
Redesigned the deployment workflow with deliberate human quality gates, cutting the release cycle from two weeks to two hours while strengthening team accountability.
Eliminated three recurring production incidents per week and protected approximately $20M in weekly transaction exposure through root-cause analysis, risk-based testing, and release governance.
Raised boundary-value test coverage from approximately 16% to 90%; test cases per feature increased from 5 to 28 (+460%).
Standardised the development-to-monitoring process across Product Engineering and collaborated directly with the Head of NOC to strengthen production monitoring, incident visibility, and service reliability.
Major Philippine Bank — Testing Centre of Excellence & Capability Transition
Established the bank's first in-house Testing Centre of Excellence in two weeks, converting a PMO cohort with no prior testing background into deployed QE practitioners and eliminating dependency on external testing vendors.
Overhauled testing standards and the test-case library; surfaced approximately 35% defect leakage during training before further customer impact.
Philippine HMO — Agile Programme Rescue & Continuous Delivery
Recovered a six-month-delayed programme and delivered simultaneous Web, iOS, Android, and Huawei releases within 90 days by resetting governance, stakeholder alignment, quality standards, and the operating model.
Embedded automation within sprints so code and tests progressed in parallel, reducing rework and bug-fixing effort by approximately 52% and removing testing as a downstream handoff bottleneck.
Improved the end-user rating from 1.8 to 4.3 (+138%) through risk-led delivery and release-readiness controls.
Led performance testing for a mental-healthcare web application designed to support approximately 100,000 users, validating responsiveness and stability before launch.
Construction & Real Estate Enterprise — Workflow Optimisation & Automation
Reduced annual testing cost and cycle time by 94% (approximately $806K automated in 1.6 months) through workflow redesign, an automation framework, and AI-enabled test authoring.
Compressed one regression cycle from 98 mandays to eight minutes and annual effort across 16 cycles from 1,568 mandays to approximately two hours.
Maya (formerly PayMaya / Voyager Innovations) — Head of Quality Engineering / Quality Engineering Manager Oct 2013 – Nov 2018
Regulated digital-payments and financial-services environment.
Led a 38-person Quality Engineering organisation through three people managers across multiple fintech business lines while the Engineering department scaled from 38 to 100+ people.
Transformed traditional, downstream QA into a modern Quality Engineering model built around shift-left practices, in-sprint automation, cross-functional accountability, and continuous delivery.
Defined test methodology, delivery standards, quality metrics, release controls, and tooling; used TestRail for test-case management and configured Jira projects and dashboards for traceability, coverage, and real-time delivery visibility.
Established Selenium as one of the organisation’s first automation frameworks and led knowledge-transfer and training programmes that standardised its use across delivery teams.
Led shift-right performance testing for live digital and streaming products, including Freenet coverage for high-profile broadcasts such as the Philippine presidential inauguration and Gilas games during FIBA.
Partnered with Product, Engineering, Operations, Governance, Risk, Security, and business leaders to align sprint execution, release readiness, production-incident SLAs, and regulatory expectations.
Provided executives with quality, risk, and delivery reporting across business domains, enabling evidence-based priority and release decisions.
Owned departmental budget, headcount and workforce planning, promotions, succession planning, compensation reviews, performance management, coaching, and capability development.
Digital Room Philippines — QA Manager Jan 2013 – Jul 2013
Led enterprise test strategy, workflow governance, risk management, and release readiness for a company-wide AWS cloud migration covering business-critical systems.
Governed TestRail-based test-case management and validated production data consistency and performance against pre-migration baselines, confirming the migration achieved measurable operational improvement.
Willis Towers Watson — QA Team Manager / Team Coordinator
May 2011 – Dec 2012
Directed a 14-person QA team supporting global insurance and enterprise applications; aligned priorities, progress, delivery risks, and release schedules with US leadership.
Applied shift-right practices through production performance testing and scheduled smoke tests that continuously verified system availability, stability, and expected behaviour.
Introduced Jira for test coverage and requirements traceability; served as ISO Champion for global internal audits and delivered specialised security and vulnerability testing for TRC Citigroup.
Affiliated Computer Services (A Xerox Company) — QA Team Lead
Jun 2008 – May 2011
Led distributed testing teams across Manila and Bangalore for healthcare platforms and established shared delivery processes, governance, and quality frameworks across locations.
Earlier Career (2004 – 2008):
Branders.com - Business Analyst
Antico Manila - QA Team Lead / Head Technical Writer
Askuserv - Programmer, QA Engineer & Technical Writer
Education
EDUCATION, CERTIFICATION & LEADERSHIP
Bachelor of Science in Information Technology — University of the East; Top 3 Graduating Batch, Academic Excellence Awardee, Distinguished Alumni Awardee.
Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) — 13+ years of Scrum and Agile practice; QE 360 Certified Agile Tester.
Software Testing World Cup 2016 — Top 10 Global Finalist.
Tech Council Member, Philippine Software Industry Association
Adjunct Faculty, De La Salle University (Software Quality Engineering)
International speaker on Quality Engineering, Agile delivery, governance, test automation, and technology transformation.
