Enterprise-grade QA strategy, performance engineering, and observability — delivered at the pace and cost that startups and scale-ups actually need.
Prior engagements include
We embed where your engineering teams need depth most — quality strategy, performance, and operational visibility.
We assess your current quality maturity, define a clear strategy, and build the frameworks and pipelines to get you there. From greenfield test estates to legacy rescue.
Define your non-functional requirements, run rigorous load and soak tests, and harden your systems before they reach production under real-world conditions.
Turn your telemetry into actionable intelligence. We build dashboards and alerting that give your teams the reference points they need to operate with confidence.
Fixed-price deliverables, day rates, and retainers — structured to match how you actually work.
A focused 60-minute consultation to talk through your current testing approach and where it's falling short. Good for startups, teams stuck with automation, or QA leads who need a sounding board.
Book Session View full details →A structured assessment of your non-functional requirements posture. Includes an architecture discussion, review of current testing practice, and a written recommendations summary.
Book Now View full details →A senior review of your pipelines, test stages, observability integration, and release gates. Delivered as a structured report with prioritised recommendations and quick wins.
Book Now View full details →A structured review of your current QA practice. We assess coverage, tooling, pipeline integration, and team capability — and deliver a prioritised recommendations report.
Book Now View full details →A collaborative workshop to define and prioritise non-functional requirements across reliability, performance, security, and operational readiness. Delivers an NFR catalogue and testing approach recommendations.
Book Now View full details →A structured performance testing review and initial test execution to understand system limits and identify bottlenecks. Includes test plan, execution using JMeter or k6, and a full performance report.
Book Now View full details →A focused day of senior consultancy. Architecture reviews, strategy sessions, team workshops, or hands-on implementation — structured around your priority.
Book a Day View full details →Ongoing senior QA and engineering advisory on retainer. Regular check-ins, strategy input, code and pipeline reviews, and direct access when you need it most.
Start Retainer View full details →One dedicated day per week of senior hands-on advisory. Architecture, pipelines, testing, tooling — structured around your team's priorities on a regular weekly cadence.
Book Now View full details →No ambiguity, no scope creep. Every engagement follows the same clear process from first contact to final delivery.
We begin with a structured conversation to understand your stack, team, current pain points, and what success looks like. No assumptions, no templates applied blindly.
We review your existing coverage, pipelines, tooling, and team capability. Gaps are mapped against industry benchmarks and your specific risk profile.
A clear, prioritised plan — not a 40-page report nobody reads. We align on what matters most and define a path to get there in a timeframe that makes business sense.
Hands-on implementation alongside your team. Framework builds, pipeline integration, test authoring, tooling configuration — we work in your environment, not around it.
A thorough handover with documentation your team can actually use. We review outcomes against the original objectives and agree next steps — closure or ongoing advisory.
I'm Martin Croft. I've been in and around software quality since 1996 — starting at Microsoft testing early web sites, then moving into freelance work on interactive TV platforms for Oracle and Sky. Over the following years I went deeper into performance and non-functional testing, working across financial services, energy, and media, before leading non-functional test strategy and heading up testing for Fleet Operations at BP.
I work directly with engineering teams, not around them. No layers of account management, no junior consultants doing the delivery. When you engage Datum, you get me — embedded in your environment, asking the uncomfortable questions, and giving you a straight answer on where your quality practice stands and what needs to change.
Datum is a surveying term: a fixed reference point from which all measurements are taken. That's what rigorous QA and engineering practice should be — a stable, trusted baseline that everything else is built against.
He relentlessly champions quality and performance ensuring programme wide adoption of the necessary strategy and processes to ensure the focus on quality remains front and centre within Enterprise Scale Agile environments comprising of multiple vendors. Highly knowledgeable and with extensive experience Martin is huge asset to any business.
Martin took ownership of implementing and measuring different ways of measuring NFRs in the project excellently. This involved taking the ideas all the way from concept to delivery; including test configuration, environment spin-up and easy to understand results reporting. Also tweaked out some excellent performance gains — ~400% gain in one product — by understanding platform configurations.
"Performance Engineering Mentor" is the phrase that comes to mind when I think about Martin. Martin introduced several tools — webpagetest, Gatling, Blazemeter, Lighthouse — to enable front-end performance tuning along with API-level early performance testing. Martin's innate ability to manage multiple projects and vendors, delivering agile projects with high quality, increased productivity of the company.
Of all the SDETs, Testers & QA Engineers I have worked with, none have come close to having the breadth and depth of knowledge in the Non-Functional requirements space as Martin. With this knowledge is an immense understanding of how it can be applied in any context, to massively improve the quality of software and the software development process itself. Martin is also a fantastic asset when it comes to training others — you'll see a visible improvement in the quality of your software.
I have had the pleasure of working with Martin who has approached some difficult tasks with good humor and a determination to get the job done. Martin demonstrated a good understanding of security issues and why they should be resolved as early as possible in the DevOps process.
Martin represents a unique skill set in the modern quality assurance space. His ability to see the bigger picture, drive business process innovation, offer agile coaching and team mentoring in a dynamic environment is coupled with a deep and diverse technology background. At home driving modern DevOps and Playwright-based innovation, he has a strong grasp of technology fundamentals from layer 1 of the OSI stack upwards — driving him to exacting quality standards across the full technology stack and innovating to manage legacy technology challenges. Martin's breadth of knowledge on technology capabilities and solution expectations supports a very real improvement in outcomes and end-user experience.
38 recommendations on LinkedIn
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