Senior Quality Analyst

Senior Quality Analyst at SNDigital

We are looking for a Senior 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.

We are proud to be an equal opportunity  employer. All applicants will be considered for employment on the basis of merit alone, without attention to age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.

SN Digital (SND) is a technology division of Springer Nature. We are responsible for maintaining and delivering millions of articles used by researchers, scientists and students around the globe.

We are 230 people based in London, Berlin, Lisbon, Pune, New York, Madrid, Dordrecht, and Heidelberg. We work in collaborative, multi-disciplinary delivery teams, developing digital products and services that answer user problems and support business goals.

The work is exciting and meaningful. Our culture is collaborative and friendly. We encourage and support growth, both personal and professional.

Having a good command of English is essential; collaboration is vital in our day to day work, so being able to communicate your ideas and understand others is critical.

This role is a terrific opportunity for friendly, curious people who want to get involved in our work, who love to learn, who will embrace and develop our culture, and help make SND a place where people and ideas can thrive.

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 Non functional 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 teamplayer:

• Be the quality champion: Plan, lead, visualise 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 , organise bug bashes, be involved in tech reviews, running retros, 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. 
  • Retrospecting 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
  • Analysing 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 organise events/sharing sessions and participate in community meetings.
• As a Senior you are expected to work with Lead 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 programme 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 wrt:
  • 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.

• #LI-CK2

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