Quality Analyst

Job Title: Quality Analyst

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

About Springer Nature Group:

Springer Nature opens the doors to discovery for researchers, educators, clinicians and other professionals. Every day, around the globe, our imprints, books, journals, platforms and technology solutions reach millions of people. For over 180 years our brands and imprints have been a trusted source of knowledge to these communities and today, more than ever, we see it as our responsibility to ensure that fundamental knowledge can be found, verified, understood and used by our communities – enabling them to improve outcomes, make progress, and benefit the generations that follow. Visit group.springernature.com and follow @SpringerNature / @SpringerNatureGroup

About SN Digital:

sndigital.springernature.com

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.

There are c.230 of us in London, Berlin, Pune, New York, Madrid, Dordrecht, 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 interesting and meaningful.

Our culture is collaborative and friendly.

We encourage and support growth, both personal and professional.

This is a terrific opportunity for friendly, inquisitive people who want to get involved in our work, who love to learn, who will embrace and develop our culture, and help make SNDigital Pune a place where people and ideas can thrive. Having a good command of English is important; collaboration is important in our day to day work, so being able to communicate your ideas and understand others’ is key.

We are intentionally looking to create teams that are diverse and inclusive. Diversity is the mix of culture, background, experience and personality that we all bring; inclusion is getting the mix to work better together. We want every member of our teams to contribute to our common goals while respecting each other's skills, knowledge and needs. 

Your Role:

We are looking for Quality Analysts who are passionate about quality and believe in continuously improving and baking it into the product.

QA != End of the line testing 

QA != Gatekeeper of releases

QA != Automate all the things

The role of a QA is analyzing all aspects of the development cycle from design discussions to monitoring in production with a view of reducing risk. Advising teams on how (and what) to test and coaching them to constantly think about the cross-functional requirements from the get-go. Driving the team towards working in smaller batches, releasing more frequently, shortening feedback loops and learning from log analytics and customer feedback.  Your interaction and collaboration with different roles and teams are more valued than finding bugs or writing test scripts and documenting test cases and charters. 

What drives you daily is in finding where risk lies in the software lifecycle, and how to surface it at the earliest opportunity.

You will also be a part of a global QA community working across London, Pune, Berlin and Lisbon. We invest in our employees and we also expect you to take responsibility for your own personal growth and continuous improvement. We are looking for people who constantly look for things to learn and believe in sharing and helping others grow.

Your Responsibilities:

You are expected to be the proactive person in your team whose focus is on finding and surfacing potential risk at any stage of development. You will also be looked upon to explore/support new ideas/tools/techniques within the QA space to help us grow as a community.

• Be the Quality advocate: You will be expected to contribute to team discussions to provide the perspective of “what if?”. You will question decisions made in order to ensure everyone understands the detail, and also that the detail provides the correct way forward. You will be the go to person for the team regarding what is in production, what is in each environment and what is due to be built next.

• Analyze and improve designs: Strong at understanding how things work under the hood i.e. the technical architecture. You don’t have to write the code but understand technical and UX design well enough to help improve it by contributing to discussions with insights from testing and past failures.

• Risk-Based Testing: We don’t believe in testing everything before things get into production. You need to be able to follow a risk-based testing strategy by taking inputs from various roles and stakeholders of the product so that you can efficiently use your time for exploratory testing of the product instead of writing and covering all test cases.

• Continuously advocating for the correct automatic testing: We believe in the need for an automated test suite that executes quickly. This requires understanding of the best place to execute a particular test in code. Our developers write tests and you as a QA are expected to understand what they assert, where in the technology stack they should sit and what should be added/altered/deleted to maintain the correct regression checks. 

• Be the advocate for testability:  Constantly talking to the team about adding logging and traceability to the system so that the product is well equipped to be monitored to debug issues that might crop up in production.

• Be the user's eyes and ears: Regularly bring customer focus to your testing, to help the team make better decisions. We need a system thinker who always considers a user perspective, both before AND after things are put into production. 

• Managing defects: 

  • Preventing them over finding and logging them. 

  • Retrospecting them to come up with a plan for preventing it the next time.

  • Ensuring that the team addresses them before moving on to build anything new

• Focus on shifting left but don’t forget shift right: Continuously and proactively helping us to monitor the product in production, helping us learn from every deployment

  • Analyzing failures and their patterns to prevent such occurrences

  • Help the team in setting up alerts/ iteratively improving alerts

  • Digging up logs to debug and understand what’s going wrong

• Cross-Functional Requirements: Understanding the importance of Security, Performance, Accessibility and Scalability for your team, how to structure valuable tests to be able to monitor them. Providing team insight into any legal and compliance requirements too.

• Root Cause Analysis: Be an advocate for getting the team to do root cause analysis and post mortems of issues regularly. You should be able to understand the code structure enough to assist with debugging any issues that arise.

• Advocate process improvements: Continually providing suggestions for the team to consider regarding process improvements. Breadth of experience of well known methodologies is less essential than a confident, proactive individual who is always looking to improve the way we work.

• Help the QA community grow: Be an active member of the QA team, helping organize events/sharing sessions and participate in community meetings. Be proactive in the QA space encouraging learning through sharing past experiences and any relevant literature.

At Springer Nature, we value the diversity of our teams. We recognize the many benefits of a diverse workforce with equitable opportunities for everyone. We strive for an inclusive workplace that empowers all our colleagues to thrive. Our search for the best talent fully encompasses and embraces these values and principles.

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