Teresa Sparkman is a Principal Engineer, Test Automation, at Time Warner Cable (TWC). Teresa’s career has progressed from small business owner to Quality Assurance (QA) and research test software programmer to the technical leader of a small agile engineering team. Her current team focuses on enabling automated testing across more than 30 projects and 4 locations.
Teresa started her engineering career while still a student at the University of Colorado at Boulder. There she worked on several projects in the Aerospace Engineering department, creating a test harness that flew on several space missions and publishing her first paper, on windmill data analysis.
After graduating with a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Teresa joined the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS), at the Department of Commerce NIST/NOAA/NTIA Laboratories. At ITS Teresa programmed a Shortwave Radio Interoperability Test, wrote and presented additional publications and programmed software for an FAA mobile laboratory, for which she shares a patent with other team members. She transitioned into the cable industry at Harmonic (formerly DiviCom, Inc.), first as a test engineer and then as Lead for the local QA group, testing products that included hardware, embedded software, and network management software. She continued her publishing, presenting periodically to company-wide audiences and conferences.
Teresa started at TWC more than 10 years ago, as a QA tester for the servers of a cutting-edge project. Working at TWC gave her the opportunity to lead testing across a spectrum of products. Using both her technical and leadership skills, she has worked to improve the development process through a broad range of efforts, including coordinating testing efforts across several teams, working agilely with the development teams, and designing a training program for new team members. Teresa has excelled as a mentor for junior engineers and has developed more than 10 engineers into star performers at TWC.
Her current project is growing the Automated Test Framework (ATF) from a simple test harness testing a single product, into a portable, modular, reusable harness testing more than 30 products, which has now been adopted by other teams. She has promoted the team, framework and methodology to become recognized as an agile team resource, focused on collaboration and innovation.
In her spare time, Teresa enjoys being with her husband at their home in Denver, Colorado. Teresa is a Renaissance woman, enjoying many hobbies and pastimes, such as gardening, fiber arts, watercolor, piano, reading, cooking, learning languages and Zumba.
