Job Description

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Lead Quality Analyst at SNDigital
We are looking for a Lead Quality Analyst who can help the development teams build quality from ground up in all stages of delivering software. The job is based in Pune and you will be working with team members in London.
As a lead QA you are expected to be the enabler and influencer of quality for your team to bring the focus on quality to the forefront of development. Interaction and collaboration with different roles and teams is more valued than finding bugs or writing test scripts and documenting test cases and charters.
SN Digital is a technology division of Springer Nature that provides products and services around various aspects of the publishing workflow to make them easier and more efficient.
Visit sndigital.springernature.com to learn more about who we are and what we do.
Skills for the role:
Experience with coaching/mentoring the team to build quality from ground up
Good working knowledge with lean/kanban/agile methodologies
Knowledge of CI/CD environment, with multiple releases per day - Jenkins,Go,Github,Docker
Knowledge of monitoring tools - Grafana, New Relic, Kibana
Experience with APIs and ability to write functional tests around them- REST APIs, Postman, Insomnia
Experience making Nonfunctional requirements first class citizens - Snyk, Speedcurve, Gatling, Pa11y
Good to know the workings of :
Nosql Databases like mongodb
Messaging systems like rabbitmq
Dockerised tests and builds
The role and the mindset
Be a team player:
Be the quality champion: Plan, lead, visualize and follow up on the QA strategy. Communicate what you do effectively within the team.
Be a generalist: As a cross functional delivery team it will be part of your job to contribute throughout the delivery process.
Do qualitative analysis: Thinking in a curious, critical, analytical way about UX research, BA findings, PM Comms and the overall product and less of the "I must know all about the code and tests or I'm a failure".
People over processes: You have seen the best and worst of all different ways of working Agile/Lean/Kanban and understand the need for processes or the need to not have them either.
Be Collaborative: actively engages in all aspects of the team like getting them together for story level kickoffs , organize bug bashes, be involved in tech reviews, running retro, facilitating team discussions.
Be vocal and suggest changes about risks that are hampering our goals to effectively deliver what we committed to
Be the friendly pair: with any and all roles to bring in the quality mindset e.g. devs to help find inconsistencies in the software/ analysts to help find gaps and edge cases.
Encourage Feedback: Be an active member of the team and org by keeping communication lines open to seeking and giving feedback continuously
Help your team focus on quality:
Be the explorer: Come up with ways to explore the product, finding gaps and improvements along the way. Effective at finding way to feed this into the team development cycle.
Know your consumers:
Brings in the bigger picture perspective by talking to the consumers
Be able to manage distributed users and applications
Managing defects:
Preventing them over finding and logging them.
Retrospection them to come up with a plan for preventing it the next time.
Understanding the tech architecture: Strong at understanding how things work under the hood i.e. you don't have to write the code but should follow discussions well enough to be contributing and engaged.
Improving our test suites: Good understanding of the test pyramid and its variations
Be able to make a good judgement call on when an automated test is required and when it is NOT.
be able to pair on writing lower level tests and spot missing ones
Structuring builds:
Good knowledge of how CI/CD pipelines work and find ways of testing or structuring tests that allow us to have shorter release times without compromising on quality.
Monitoring Production: Helping us look at the impact of releases when things go live
Analyzing failures and their patterns to prevent such occurrences
Help the team in setting up alerts/ iteratively improving alerts
Non Functional Requirements: Understanding the importance of Security, Performance and Accessibility, Scalability for your team how to go about doing these tests/monitoring them with continuous releases.
Help the QA community grow:
Be an active member of the QA team, helping organize events/sharing sessions and participate in community meetings.
As a lead you are expected to work with head of QA to identify and mentor juniors on improving their skills
Be proactive in the QA space trying to discover new tools and techniques in the QA space and share the knowledge with the QA team
Roadmap of the role
Within 3 months
Begin to contribute:
Develop understanding of the programmer of work
Be able to contribute hands-on on the QA activities of the team in Berlin and Pune
Build relationships and understand the view of quality on the domain:
with key technical and business stakeholders
with your counterpart QAs in Pune
with the other roles within your team [UX/BA/Devs]
Understand and Identify gaps in the current QA strategy with help of relationships writ:
Define Quality Parameters for the entire domain
What QA Processes exist and do they work?
Are there proper communication lines set up?
How can we improve release cycle times?
Build Non Functional Requirements as first class citizens
How can we improve production support and monitoring
Identify improvements in the QA skills on the domain, to provide opportunities for the lesser experienced members to learn and grow.
Within 6 months
Build a QA strategy with collaboratively with your QA team/ technical head/ QA head from the identified gaps above:
Align the QA team in the domain with the vision of quality you have managed to gain from the key stakeholders.
Collaborate/Pair/Lead the QAs to build a common understanding of the scope QA strategy and how to execute it effectively
Work with the team/domain members and QA manager to help less experienced members grow their skills e.g. Use 10% time to mentor other QAs.
Collaboratively share the work being done on QA team within the domain to the wider QA community.
Within a year
Collect feedback and re-iterate on the initial QA strategy and collaboratively come up with ways of improving it
Work with the Head of QA and try to build a culture of quality from ground up and ingrained within the daily activities
Get lead stakeholders and management on board with our quality from ground up approach, and how it improves the domain deliverables
Mentor the QA team on the domain with the principles and skills required around a good QA strategy so that they can continue to improve it on their own.
At Springer Nature, we value the diversity of our teams and work to build an inclusive culture, where people are treated fairly and can bring their differences to work and thrive. We empower our colleagues and value their diverse perspectives as we strive to attract, nurture and develop the very best talent.
Springer Nature was awarded Diversity Team of the Year at the 2022 British Diversity Awards. Find out more about our DEI work here.
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