Lead Associate - Quality

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, support and develop Test Analysts and other quality practitioners, setting clear expectations and providing coaching, feedback and practical guidance.
• Champion shared ownership of quality within cross-functional teams and help squads make evidence-based decisions about coverage, risk and release readiness.
• Define and promote proportionate quality standards, testing practices and ways of working, ensuring they are understood and applied consistently.
• Build effective working relationships with Product, Business Analysis, Engineering, Delivery, Operations and other stakeholders.
• Develop and maintain risk-based test strategies and plans aligned to business outcomes, technical change, delivery approach and project constraints.
• Assess change impact, dependencies and quality risks early; define suitable test levels, types, environments, data, tooling, entry and exit criteria, and evidence requirements.
• Ensure test coverage is traceable to requirements, acceptance criteria, risks and critical business processes without creating unnecessary administration.
• Plan regression, integration, system, exploratory, non-functional and user acceptance testing as appropriate to the change.
• Monitor testing progress, quality indicators, defects and residual risk, communicating concise and actionable information to relevant stakeholders.
• Contribute quality evidence and recommendations to collective release-readiness decisions; escalate material gaps or risks clearly and promptly.
• Personally design, execute and maintain tests when needed, using manual and/or automated techniques appropriate to the context.
• Undertake exploratory, functional, integration, regression and other relevant testing of new and existing functionality.
• Create clear, maintainable test cases, charters, data and evidence at a level proportionate to the risk and delivery need.
• Identify, isolate, reproduce and document defects; support root-cause analysis and verify fixes.
• Use relevant tools to inspect applications, interfaces, APIs, data and logs where required to investigate behaviour and build confidence.