As a QA Architect within a wider product engineering team you will have responsibility for the managing and maintenance of the software quality assurance practice & QA community at Wood Mackenzie.  This will include responsibility for tooling, framework recommendations, oversight into methodologies, quality metrics and participating in hiring

This hands-on role will involve supporting multiple engineering teams to harness QA disciplines, to work with and nurture QA engineers/analyst in and around automation testing, work with stakeholders as well to grow the QA automation capacity within engineering teams.

A key part will be in supporting the planning of test activity, ensuring acceptance criteria meets the required levels and ensure the subsequent execution and reporting of test execution meets the desired expectations.

Working closely with the teams, the QA Lead will support the embedded test analysts to ensure testing practices and methods are performed diligently and to ensure that the necessary rigour is applied in all aspects of testing.  This will entail ensuring testing frameworks are adopted, utilized and maintained.  In addition, there will be a need to ensure there is support & opportunity to provide root cause analysis.

Working as part of a distributed QA community, you will provide leadership, feedback, mentoring and coaching as required. With a flexible but hands on approach, you will be comfortable managing challenging timescales and orchestrate activities.

To fit our culture, you will genuinely care about software testing, software automation and about delivering a great service, take the time to gain a clear understanding of the products and services we deliver, whilst being able to identify and recommend opportunities for improvement.

Essential Functions of the Job:

• Create/refine the development of Test Automation Frameworks, Standards, Procedures with QA engineers, engineering teams and stakeholders
• Define and refine quality metrics working with engineering leads and stakeholders
• Maintain and Guide Test Automation Suites, undertake analysis of results to ensure engineering team remain productive and informed with the right level of detail
• Provide technical guidance and expertise to team members, colleagues when required
• Coordinate across distributed engineering team QA practices, including making and championing testing framework recommendation to ensure the QA practice remains aligned with engineering goals
• Support implementing test strategies in line with industry best practice methods to suit different systems and software components, mainly consisting Web APIs and Web UIs.
• Growing QA function capacity
• Mentoring/Coaching/Onboard the practice of test automation
• Determining status, assessing problem areas and suggest/review corrective actions
• Direct/plan necessary activities as and when required, in conjunction with the wider engineering function
• Support activities relating to developing test strategies, and execution of test strategies in conjunction with developing acceptance criteria standard
• Work with stakeholders to determine the appropriate quality gates, taking a pragmatic stance
• Support execution of test plans for manual and automatic tests (this will initial require a hands-on approach as the team scales or becomes proficient)
• Logging, tracking and proactive management of defects to their resolution working closely within engineering teams
• Working very closely with other QA Engineers, Developers, Product Owners and other personnel and provide accurate and actionable insight 
• Collating and summarising test results ensuring engineering teams are operating transparently within acceptable quality metrics and practice
• Contribute to program/project review meetings, support quality assurance function & community, contribute to support continuous improvements
• When called upon working with our business analysts to plan testing for current and future projects
• Accurately estimating and delivering results to agreed capacity and plans
• Regular progress reporting to engineering managers and directors

Analytical/Decision Making Responsibilities:

• Proactive approach to identifying issues and presenting solutions and options, and where appropriate, leading to resolution
• Ability to clearly articulate both problems and proposed solutions
• Ability to prioritize personal and team workloads to best meet organizational objectives

Supervision/Coaching Responsibilities:

• Take responsibility for integrity of testing and acceptance activities and coordinates the execution of these activities including support QA engineers/QA community
• Provide coaching, coordination and lead co-workers and when called upon project team members
• Responsible for training and standards for functional team performance
• Reviews performance, and conducts career development discussions

 
Knowledge and Skill Experience Requirements:

• Experience of working in Agile, waterfall & hybrid delivery models and adapting testing approaches
• Experience in using and development of Automation Framework(s)/tooling targeting Web APIs, Web UI automated tests (e.g. Cucumber, SpecFlow, Selenium, Protractor, Cypress.IO)
• Experience in full web-based application development life cycle
• Practical exposure to tooling including Jira, BrowserStack, Selenium, Postman, JetBrains, GIT/Bitbucket
• Good working knowledge of one or more test management tools, preferably TestRail
• Good working knowledge of at least one development language such as Python/Java/.NET/Javascript and API automation
• Practical knowledge for extracting KPI into dashboards for high-level benchmarking and monitoring
• Skilled in the testing techniques required to drive out test conditions from key documents that form the test basis
• Typically, 3+ years working as a Test Analyst/QA Engineer across a number of programs including all key test phases (desirable)
• Develop and maintain strong working relationships with wider team is essential
• ISTQB Foundation Certificate in Software Testing, is valued but not necessary
• Educated to degree level, equivalent combination of education and business or IT experience

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All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.