Head of Software Quality Assurance / Software Quality Assurance Manager

The role combines a balance of strategy, coordination, and hands-on work. The ideal candidate will have in-depth of experience across the SDLC in an agile process and up-to-date knowledge of best practice test approaches, tools and methods. They will have a strong technical background and be able to absorb technical information to ensure they understand elements and interactions of a full system (as used by our customers).

The role will be responsible for reactive (product/system) support elements, to have awareness and seek to identify the root cause of such support issues, and being empowered to plan the proactive development work, process improvement or other aspects required to avoid a repeat occurrence - overall improving our product quality and customer satisfaction.

Ensure that the testing strategy is defined, understood and followed by the Testing team and the wider Engineering team, and is following industry best practices.

The role will line manage the Test Engineering team (a team of six) and the (3rd Line) Development Support team (a team of three). You will report into the Head of Product Development.

This position is an advocate in the overall culture, vision, and values of Synectics.

Principal Accountabilities

• Provide leadership and technical expertise within Quality Assurance and Test Automation areas.
• Work towards creating a culture of ‘right the first time’.
• The first person responsible for the quality, reliability, and stability of our solutions.
• Support Product Managers around major releases, making sure all the supporting material is in place and on schedule (e.g. software installers, manuals, release notes, Global Support Portal updates, training).
• Responsible for gatekeeping software and product releases, ensuring our teams meet the agreed release requirements, which may include elements such as: code standards, build pipelines, deployment pipelines, vulnerability scans, installer builds, regression test scripts, release notes, documentation, test system inclusion, etc.
• Engage and communicate with senior stakeholders being able to escalate and articulate critical risks to director level as required.
• Encourage our global stakeholders to feedback their user and engineering experience of our products and be a conduit for driving improvement on their behalf.
• Assist in the creation of the team KPIs as well as monitor and report on results.
• Work with Product Managers and Product Owners to ensure requirements and user stories on the backlog will lead to high-quality development and delivery.
• Ensure that all aspects of projects have been considered by the team including non-functional requirements and security concerns.
• Work hard to ensure our products align to the specifications and the performance we state and work with the teams on corrective actions when a gap or shortfall is identified.
• Encourage the identification, specification and development of internal tools which bring consistency to products, configurations, and deployments to reduce variables, effort and increase the ease and speed of system deployment.
• Identify key standards, improvements or lessons learned and effectively communicate them across the teams, ensuring they are implemented consistently and proportionately.
• To track and be aware of repeat issues and pain points, working to identify the root causes and adding to the backlog for future improvement.
• Implement clear test strategies and audit and risk control policies across teams.
• Support the team in determining which test phases will be automated and in selecting and implementing appropriate test tools.
• Drive continuous improvement in test coverage and test effectiveness.
• Ensure the design and performance individual components or products work as expected in the final ‘full system’ configuration and representative environment, as will ultimately be deployed by our customers.
• Lead defect management and triage meetings as required.

Essential Criteria:

• Excellent understanding and a good level of competency of good practice in the end-to-end processes of designing, building, testing and releasing software.
• Demonstrable experience in working and leading in a fast-paced, high-impacting, Agile digital delivery environment.
• Able to communicate a complicated problem succinctly, accurately and coherently to a team with different skill sets.
• Strong problem-solving nature, with the ability to examine a problem and involve the appropriate people at the appropriate time.
• Strong commercial awareness, understanding the wider impact of making decisions across the department and the business.
• Able to mentor and share knowledge across the team and wider department.
• Experience in challenging others to develop, whilst serving as a role model.

Key Personal Attributes

• Capable and comfortable in balancing higher-level strategy and direction planning and with more hands-on elements such as test automation and process improvement.
• Excellent communicator to foster strong cross-team collaboration and ensure alignment in targets and releases.
• Enjoys making yourself visible and available for your teams, with a servant leadership style.
• Rigorous in your desire to eradicate team or process inconsistencies to reduce inefficiency and focus on the most valuable work.

Qualifications and experience:

• Significant experience in a quality focused role.
• Experience of leading quality and test-driven teams.
• Ideally an undergraduate degree in related field (Quality/Software Testing/Computer Science/Software development/IT & Networking)
• ISEB/ISTQB certification(s).
• Very familiar with the Software Development Life Cycle and associated tools in an agile development process.
• Demonstrable experience of creation and maintenance of frameworks for both Automated Testing and Performance Testing.
• Demonstrable experience of designing and implementing test and automated test strategies, using tools such as: Selenium, Test complete, Browser Stack, LoadRunner, or others.
• Demonstrable experience of API testing, with such tools as Postman or others.
• Good technical experience with MS Windows platforms
• Beneficial: experience with TCP/IP networks, routing, firewalls and multicast data.
• Beneficial:  experience with Azure DevOps and CI/CD Pipelines.

Eligibility for Employment in the UK

In accordance with current legislative requirements within the UK, any successful applicant must produce verification of their eligibility to live and work in the UK. Such verification should be taken in advance of the employment start date and the applicant will be unable to start in their role until this has been received by Synectics.

Our Commitment to Equality and Diversity

Synectics plc and its subsidiaries are committed to promoting equal opportunities in employment and in our employment policies for recruitment, selection, training, development and promotion. Such policies are in place to ensure that both job applicants and employees of Synectics receive equal treatment regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, marital or civil partnership status, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation.