The Vacancy

As a business, Hermes is driven by our four values of; Do the right thing, Dare to be different, Strive for more and Be customer obsessed.  It’s because of these values that we are the UK’s leading consumer delivery service handling over 630 million parcels per year and still growing and our IT team help to drive that growth.

Hermes has undergone a significant transformation moving from a parcel-centric business to a customer-focused business.  There continues to be significant investment into IT realising Hermes’ vision of being a digital business with data being a significant enabler for the Hermes Business Strategy.

As a result of our continued growth, the Hermes Assurance & Engineering team have a brand new role for a Senior Manual QA Tester.

Overview: 

The Senior QA Tester is responsible for ensuring quality throughout the software development lifecycle working with cross-functional teams to test features from a functional and component perspective and also integrated with other systems. This role is responsible to make sure all components within the Hermes system value chain contributing to the product outcome and user experience works appropriately E2E and that the Quality Assurance standards set by the practice are met.

They will work under the guidance of Primes or the Delivery Manager in Test and will be expected to collaborate very closely with other testers and engineers in order to provide holistic view of the systems and how they integrate with each other. This will allow for engineers to anticipate issues in advance to reduce errors with complex integrations downstream. The Senior QA Tester should always be looking to identify repetitive tasks that can be automated  in order to reduce toil and lead time for deployment of secure code.

They will gain an in-depth understanding of Hermes parcel life-cycle (physical and logical). Will maintain test team standards and processes and promote a positive view of the test function.

In some cases, if working under the Delivery Manager in Test, direct line management duties are expected of more junior members of the team. The role holder will be expected to have basic people administration and management experience to a level that they can provide cover for Primes  or Delivery Manager in Test should the need / opportunity arise.

This role will carry out some or all of the following activities:

• Liaise with Product Owners and  Technical Business Analyst to understand requirements
• Analyse requirements to identify all relevant tests scenarios and edge cases.
• Work with developers to understand the flow of code
• Create and documents comprehensive and well-structured test plans and test cases.
• Design and implement datasets to support functional, integration and E2E testing activities
• Estimating, prioritising, planning and coordinating quality testing activities.
• Oversee deployment and system packaging process by coordinating with prime testers
• Testing the modules and component parts of the application in isolation and integrated
• Identify potential issues and escalate to team or function principal
• Support automation testers on shifting left critical scenarios
• Recognise routine tasks as learning opportunities and seek ways to improve/automate
• Execute tests during the development lifecycle, at sprint and release level
• Executing all levels of testing regularly and no less than at every sprint:
  • System - functional and non-functional (might include performance testing),
  • Integration,
  • Regression,
  • User Acceptance testing
• Performing thorough automated regression testing on demand whenever:
  • New software is committed
  • Bugs are resolved
• Logging test executions and tracking defects.
• Support on the investigation and troubleshoot of issues and non-conforming software.
• Tracking quality assurance metrics around defects.
• Staying up-to-date with new testing tools and test strategies.

You will be accountable for:            

• Coordinating with product management and software and support engineers to deliver stable enterprise software products.
• Assessing the final integration QA milestone before features are deemed ready for performance testing and promotion to production
• Prepare software defect tracking and report entire project release status to stakeholders.
• Coaching and in some cases managing other junior members of the team

Knowledge & Experience:

• 4+ years of experience as a Quality Assurance Tester  
• Extensive knowledge of system integration testing methodologies, defect tracking systems, and Quality Assurance process
• Strong knowledge of using software QA methodologies, tools and processes
• Hands-on JIRA experience of transitioning user stories to completion
• Experience in writing clear, concise and comprehensive test plans and cases
• Hands-on experience with black box testing and integrations
• Experience working in an Agile software development team
• System Analysis capabilities are desired

Technical & People Skills:

• Well versed in software development and testing life cycle
• Familiar with queueing and data stream systems
• Database interrogation skills (SQL)
• Ability to design regression scripts, execute them and report accurately
• Understanding of API calls and JSON structures
• Basic interaction with FTP and XML Structures
• Experience in analysing issues and Route cause
• Understanding of Test Case Scenarios written in Gherkin syntax
• Familiar with automation principles and desire to augment capabilities
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills
• Analytical mind and problem-solving aptitude
• Understanding of: AWS, S3 buckets, Oracle, Serenity, J-Meter, Cassandra, Rabbit MQ
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills
• Attention to detail

Qualifications:

• BSc in Computing Science or equivalent combination of training/experience
• ISTQB certification is desirable

Why Work for Us?

There are lots reasons to join Hermes, but don’t just take our word for it, let our people tell you why they love working here; “Fun and fast-paced”, “Great choice of benefits”, “Great training and development”, “New challenges every day”, “The company  is growing fast”, “Working with like-minded people who are passionate about what they do”.