Qa engineer

The QA primarily a hands-on role with responsibility for improving and ensuring the overall quality of delivery through a keen focus on the systematic and consistent production of both manual and executable specifications. The QA is responsible for capturing and executing comprehensive, testable and increasingly executable requirements in a ubiquitous language through close collaboration with a broad selection of stakeholders.

PRINCIPAL RESPONSIBILITIES

Quality Assurance Focus

Responsible for contributing to the ongoing continuous improvement in overall quality that takes the form of agreed principles and practices that are aligned with industry best practice. Responsible for:

Providing a focal point for the delivery effort within a team in order to meet agreed quality assurance standards that balance time and/or cost constraints Ensuring test coverage is completely aligned with requirements to include traceability and assurance that delivery meets customer need

Contributing to and adherence to agreed quality assurance standards Contributing to requirements capture to include cross-cutting (non-functional) requirements and the subsequent test strategy/plan
Defect tracking and reporting agreed metrics and progress
Proactive communication and escalation of requirement and quality assurance risks, issues and other relevant information

Delivery Practices

Responsible for the timely delivery of value that encompasses the full software development life-cycle to include:

Quality Management: understand, communicate and ensure quality is a forethought, considered and built in at the start of activities. Reaches out across teams and coaches for quality, agreeing quality targets and standards that promote continuous improvement
Executable Specifications: capture and automation of requirements as tests in a ubiquitous language prior to or alongside the production of clean code. To include formulating and executing manual testing and agreeing on pragmatic automation targets and ensuring adherence to these targets

Continuous Integration and Delivery: automate agreed quality standards and metrics together with the deployment and provision of environments. To include agreeing standards and guidelines to provide the team with regular timely feedback on completeness

Behaviours

Promotes an environment where:

it is enjoyable to do the right thing the right way quality is at the heart of everything we do
waste is minimised if not eliminated
we continually learn and improve

advice and help is available

CHARACTERISTICS

Assertive: self confident but not arrogant. Exhibits an assurance in their abilities that is persuasive and balances their abilities and contributions whilst recognising the value of others
Driven: focused on results. Exhibits a willingness to do what it takes to consistently deliver on commitments, under-promising and over-delivering whilst a balancing sustainable pace with a determination to meet and exceed expectations
Open: promotes transparency and accountability. Exhibits a trusted nature, shares information appropriately and receptive to new ideas and ways of working and embraces change
Collaborative: works well with others at all levels. Exhibits an ability to empathize and put themselves in others’ situations, able to build on others’ ideas and moderate communication according to the audience
Team Player: does what is best for the team. Exhibits an ability to maximize their value to the team and project, guide contributions and determine what is needed, when it is needed and make it happen

ESSENTIAL SKILLS 

Effective Communication evidence must include a good command of English both written and verbal combined with the ability to communicate complexity in a simple manner to all levels
Testing Best Practice evidence must include a familiar with Smoke Testing, Functional and cross-cutting (non-functional) testing to include but is not limited to: integration, volume, performance, security, usability, exploratory, regression testing etc.
Reporting evidence must include defect management, quality targets/dashboards together with quality standards and guidance

Software/Scripting Languages must include 1 or more of the following C#/ ASP .NET, Java, PHP, Ruby/Ruby on Rails, Delphi, C/C++, VB/Classic ASP

Databases evidence must include 1 or more of the following: MySQL, MS SQL Server, Oracle, Postgres, DB2

Continuous Integration evidence must include familiarity with continuous integration servers such as TeamCity, Hudson, Jenkins, CruiseControl together with build tools such as Ant/Nant, MSBuild, Rake and Version Repositories such as Subversion or GIT

DESIRABLE SKILLS + EXPERIENCE

Automated Acceptance Testing evidence must include tools such as Watir, Selenium, Fitnesse
Behaviour Driven Development evidence must include a tool such Cucumber, RSpec/MSpec, SpecFlow, StoryQ (Gherkin)

Software/Scripting Languages may include 2 or more languages such as Ruby on Rails, PHP, Java, Delphi, Objective-C, HTML (cross browser) , CSS, HTML, JSON, XML, Javascript, JQuery, Shell, Bash, Perl, Python
Administration evidence may include Windows, Linux, Mac and Network Administration, Virtualisation (VMWare/Hyper-V)
Environment having worked extensively in a fast paced, heterogeneous multi- platform environment
Community activity in the agile test community attending or facilitating workshops, conferences and published articles/content or blogs