Head of Quality Assurance - Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom - mkodo

mkodo

Verified Company

Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

1 week ago

Posted by:

Tom O´Connor

beBee Recruiter

Description

Role:
Head of Quality Assurance

Location:
London/Newcastle - Hybrid Office & Home

Who Are We?
mkodo builds world class apps, middleware and digital products in the global lottery, betting, and gaming space.

We have an open, supportive, dynamic culture where talented people are trusted to contribute to the team and company by carrying out their roles in a professional, collaborative, and skilled manner.

We value the expertise of our team members and offer opportunities for personal development and career progression within the company.

Acquired in February 2019, by Pollard Banknote Limited (PBL), a major supplier to the global lottery industries, brought mkodo strong financial security, access to resources and clients at a global level.

About the role:

This is an important role for the company to ensure that we provide outstanding quality products to the thousands of customers who use our Apps.

The Head of QA is accountable for all testing activity taking place within mkodo, ensuring the quality gates are consistently met or exceeded.

Working closely with the PMO and Engineering development teams, and the PBL group QA Director, to deliver efficient test strategies and test plans that when executed ensure a high quality of test performance.

Main responsibilities are:

Working with the Director of Technology & Engineering, to create and maintain the strategy that will be rolled out and inspire the QA team to act on an energised vision of quality (focussing on testing but not excluding the influence you have with other disciplines).
As part of that strategy, and working with PBL QA Director, ensure there is a clear plan for all the core elements of QA here at mkodo
Functional, Performance, Security & Integration, with particular focus on increasing coverage in our Automation framework.
Be accountable for the full test development lifecycle to ensure the output is of the highest quality before signoff to clients.
Lead and direct a team of QA Specialists providing coaching and support to drive the capability of the QA team, ensuring appropriate training and continuous development is in place to support growth and succession planning of individuals
Ensure delivery of the QA elements of projects & plans are within agreed budget, on time and to agreed scope.
Drive testers and developers to understand client needs early in the SDLC and maintain engagement throughout (in whatever way is appropriate for each client or product).
Partner with the Heads of Engineering; developing a crossfunctional team relationship that sets the bar for your direct reports. As part of this, ensure that you have full visibility of the conversations with the Project Managers, Agile Delivery Managers and Product Owners about roadmaps, the resource plans for the teams and regularly check that workload and capacity are matched.
Deliver cost effective solutions to business requirements including continual review of contracts & services
Create and manage an effective resource model usage, with a mix of permanent UK mkodo people, and offshore/nearshore resources, in addition to using shared services within the PBL where applicable.
Foster a culture of continuous improvement: Using retrospective data, project metrics, bug escape metrics and regular operational catch ups across the business, gather actionable data, track trends, and analyse data to demonstrate continuous improvement to process, approaches, and tooling across teams.
Manage the cause of reported client issues by identifying and feeding back in a professional manner, whilst managing the support queue and allocating tasks to appropriate teams or people.

Key Skills & Attributes:

Must have:

Confident leader with a strong coaching, mentoring, appreciation, and feedback ethos who can build/maintain high performing teams, communities and manage internal and external relationships.
Clear communicator who can inspire others through a multitude of mediums, be passionate, provide context, create a story and then deliver on it through teams.
Experience of managing the daily flow of project quality and testing across multiple teams including complex problem solving, resource planning, adapting quickly to change, raising risk and mitigations, working with conviction, and working to tight deadlines.
Resilient, calm, and methodical in high pressure situations and able to multitask, prioritise and make decisions
A 'secure base' for the team in any challenging situations, providing strength, encouragement, interest, challenge, insight, support, and direction; good at cutting through complexity; figuring out the processes necessary to get things done with people on board.
Excellent working knowledge of software testing techniques and methodologies throughout the SDLC, mobile testing would be a distinctive advantage.
Able to multitask, prioritise work in sometimes pressurised situations
Designing QA strategies, developi