QA Engineer Gov Newcastle (Inside IR35)

Role Profile: Test Automation Engineer, Digital Delivery Centre (HO)

Our Agile Test Engineers work as part of multidisciplinary agile scrum teams to comprehensively test the digital products and services being developed to help ensure that they meet the Government's Digital by Default Service Standard and meet the needs of our customers. As an Agile Test Engineer, you will work in partnership with Front End developers to develop both manual & automated test suites. You will implement a testing approach within regular sprint cycles that will provide an effective level of assurance before regular service releases.

We are one of the biggest of any organisation in the UK and we run the biggest digital operation in Government. Our digital business runs the IT behind tax and benefits services for 45 million individual and 4.9 million business customers. We are undergoing a major transformation programme, which includes a GBP200 million investment in digitisation, so customers can do more for themselves online and in Real Time, on computers, tablets and smartphones, bringing us bang up to date, in line with banks and other large customer operations.

We are building a team of outstanding people who will create and run these new and improved digital services. We will be using modern technology and agile development methods, and release as much of our work as possible as open source software.

As a Test Automation Engineer you will:

• Collaborate with Service/Product Managers & business analysts to ensure that user needs for new digital services are fully understood and that user stories contain effective, actionable acceptance criteria.
• Identify test cases that are suitable for automation and work with the Agile Test Coordinator, developers and architects to define the approach to automated testing.
• Write automated acceptance tests that can be integrated into the software build process.
• Organise and perform manual tests when automated approaches are not possible.
• Develop test strategies that ensure our digital services function correctly on multiple devices, including desktop, mobile, tablet, games consoles and other commonly used ways of accessing digital services.
• Test digital products for compliance with accessibility standards including WCAG 2.0.
• Participate in the wider testing community (outside of government), building relationships with other testing engineers and identifying best practices we can adopt.

Skills and Experience:

• Experience of agile software development and testing methods
• Experience of automation testing
• Demonstrable understanding of test driven development approaches
• Ability to learn Scala code to automate tests using Selenium WebDriver, and rapidly learn other tools & languages as required
• Proven ability to independently research & communicate new testing technologies or approaches
• Detail-oriented: able to document and follow detailed instructions within test scripts and defect tracking documents
• Experience of testing software across multiple web browsers and devices
• Experience of automated testing tools (eg Jenkins, jUnit, Cucumber, rspec, Selenium)
• Experience of web testing tools (eg Selenium WebDriver)
• Experience working as a test automation engineer, software developer, or other appropriate IT background, in an agile project
• Experience of Back End programming languages such as Java, Scala, Python, Ruby, C#