Automation is now a critical business capability
Script-assisted QA and copy-paste strategy decks are the old game. Automation is a business product — and the winning move is to design it outside-in: the human and AI markets that run your business first, the tech stack last.
About
I'm Eric Mumford. I've spent about thirty years in software, mostly in quality and test automation. I work in small increments, refactor as I go, and keep tests close to the code.
A lot of my work is making hard-to-test systems testable and putting measurable numbers on quality — with architectural fitness functions, clean architecture and DDD, and consumer-driven contracts. I work in Python, Java, Go, C#, F#, and Cypher, choosing the language to fit the problem.
I take on fractional, contract, and full-time work — as a head of quality, an automation architect or product owner, or a consultant.
Capabilities
What I work on, and the projects behind it
Knowledge graphs and inference
I design systems around knowledge graphs and process mining, including a modular cognitive architecture whose parts each do one job and communicate through contracts.
Test automation for hard-to-test systems
I take systems that resist automation — mainframe terminals, legacy protocols, BDD suites — and make their behavior deterministic and verifiable, replacing timing hacks with state machines and contracts.
Quality metrics and process mining
I build pipelines and graphs that pull scattered delivery data into one view — ETL across test-management platforms, DORA metrics across large repository estates, and migration trackers that estimate completion statistically.
Building and shipping products
I take products from early stage to multi-tenant SaaS, and from monolith to functional core — choosing the language to fit the problem and covering the result with tests.
Infrastructure for AI agents
I build infrastructure for autonomous agents — a multi-agent development system coordinated through event sourcing and trust boundaries, an offline-first coordination mesh where agents divide work, record decisions, and keep running without a network, and hardware that gives an agent physical control of a machine.
Frameworks & tools
I build the frameworks and tools other work depends on — resilient self-healing frameworks, ETL recovery with atomic rollback, and analysis platforms — across Python, Java, Go, C#, F#, and Cypher.
WOPR · Number of players
A machine that plays itself
In WarGames (1983), the breakthrough was teaching the computer to play a zero-player game — to run the simulation on its own. Forty years on, that's how I build: role-specialized AI agents design, write, review, and ship software with little supervision, mostly on local models. Most of the work below was built that way.
How I engage
Fractional head of quality, automation architect or product owner, or consultant — contract or full-time. Full detail in the résumé.
Full résumé
Career history, the projects below, and the unified-comms work, in one document.