Head of Test - Leeds, United Kingdom - BigChange

BigChange

Verified Company

Leeds, United Kingdom

2 days ago

Posted by:

Tom O´Connor

beBee Recruiter

Description

Reporting to the Head of Engineering, you will be responsible for defining and executing our test strategy, hiring, people management and skills development within the test practice.

Your input will be crucial in shaping the future of a fast-growing SaaS company with a varied, interesting, and challenging platform.

As the Head of Test, you are a visible leader who sets and exemplifies the standard for high quality product delivery.

You have a strong technical background and a broad and deep knowledge of modern testing tools and techniques, and you combine this with a strong focus on driving out waste, keeping things simple and delivering real business and user value.

As the most senior test practitioner, you remain hands on, helping teams solve problems.

You develop strong relationships with architecture, product and engineering leaders and use your influence to drive a focus on testing and testability in all these areas.

You lead a team of Quality Advocates who work as part of pods to coach, mentor and lead by example in driving quality enhancing practices into every stage of the SDLC.

You lead your team in defining, documenting, and embedding quality standards, guides and reusable patterns, doing so in collaboration with senior engineers, product managers and architects.

You are a highly visible leader both within the company and externally, raising the profile of test and quality advocacy as practiced at BigChange.

Requirements:

Work closely with the Heads of Architecture, Product and Engineering — and with other leaders in these specialisms — to drive a lean, testfirst approach into all areas.
Understand the test landscape across BigChange in depth, including what tests are present and a health/maturity assessment across all areas.
Establish metrics to measure the effectiveness of testing efforts and the quality of the products, including legacy/monolith, microservices, and microfrontends.
Develop and evolve a test strategy, devise an associated change plan and be responsible for its successful delivery.

This strategy and plan should include:

Functional testing tools and techniques at all layers, including codelevel, API, UI, and intersystem, with a focus on automation.
Nonfunctional testing such as security, resilience, performance, and scalability.
Embedding testing in the agile SDLC and CI/CD pipelines.
Skills and capability development of the test function, including:
Hiring, training, setting, and tracking of development goals.
Mentoring, providing feedback, and dealing with performance improvement if required.
Lead your team in defining and documenting quality standards.
Promote these standards and educate colleagues to embed them.
Provide leadership and guidance for those in the test practice to ensure they are well supported, integrating well, and providing value in their pods, and acting as an effective team to share knowledge and evolve the practices.
Lead the practice in identifying common or repeated issues and taking measures to prevent these, such as producing reusable tools or templates, developing training, or creating lightweight mechanisms.
Support others in raising the profile of test and quality advocacy at BigChange externally, and lead by example, such as by speaking at events, publishing blog posts, and contributing to opensource projects.
Remain handson and demonstrate new tools and techniques to demystify them and ensure test specialists and the wider engineering community adopt them successfully.
Stay current with new testing tools, strategies, and industry best practices.
Be an active member of the technology leadership team, and a visible leader and champion of testing throughout BigChange.
Insist on high standards but remain pragmatic and focused on delivering outcomes and customer obsession.
Be a positive representative of, and brand ambassador for BigChange.
Manage BigChange personal data and confidential information responsibly, and maintain its quality, confidentiality, integrity, and availability at all times. Report personal data and security nearmisses and incidents promptly and cooperate in their resolution.
Be aware of and comply with the BigChange Health and Safety Policy and related legislation; report Health and Safety nearmisses and accidents promptly and collaborate to document and resolve.
Ensure data processing equipment assigned to you by BigChange, and any personal equipment used to process BigChange data or access BigChange systems, is kept Codes software to existing coding standards and improves code based on peer review;
Act in the best interests of BigChange at all times.

Essential skills:

Handson experience working at all levels of the test pyramid.
Good understanding of functional and nonfunctional testing.
Indepth technical understanding of tools and techniques involved in unit, integration, and endtoend testing frameworks.
Strong understanding of how to wor