Senior Software Quality Analyst SNDigital, Lisbon/Berlin (Identity)

Senior Software Quality Analyst, SN Digital
WHO ARE WE?

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.

We’re looking for people to join our Lisbon or Berlin office who want to become part of a global team that aims to put Springer Nature at the forefront of digital publishing. There is c.230 of us in Lisbon, 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 Lisbon 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.

THE WORK
Springer Nature has a portfolio of over 3,000 peer-reviewed journals and books across all areas of science. The Shared Services domain that you’ll be joining works to create a range of world-class services for our users and audiences, ranging from email services to keep authors and readers updated on latest publication news, through to authentication that grants readers access to the content itself.

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 improving quality. Advising teams on how (and what) to test and coach 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.

You will also be a part of a global QA community working across London, Lisbon, Pune, Berlin. 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 influencer and coach for your team to bring the focus on quality to the forefront 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 strategist: You will be expected to facilitate team discussions to identify the most important quality and functional parameters for the product and come up with a strategy on how we plan to test and measure them. You need to be the go-to person to lead, visualize and follow up on the plans regularly.
• 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 product stakeholders so that you can efficiently use your time for exploratory testing instead of writing and covering all test cases.
• Continuously advocating the test pyramid: We do not believe in the need for complex parallel-running regression/smoke/sanity test suites. The end-to-end tests need to be minimal and need-based. Our developers write tests, and you as QA are expected to understand what those are. Analyze risks and tests at lower levels by collaborating and building a thorough understanding of tests written by various roles.
• Shorten our feedback cycles, without compromising on quality: We need someone who is strong at understanding and working with CI/CD. You will need to analyze and help improve release times, think about how often we release to the customer and work with the whole team to find ways of structuring tests that allow us to have reasonable build times without compromising on quality.
• 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 in your testing to help the team make better decisions. We need a systems thinker who brings in the user perspective, both before AND after things are put into production.
• Managing defects: 
  • Preventing over finding and logging them.
  • Retrospecting to come up with a plan for preventing them the next time.
• Focus on shifting left but don’t forget shift right: Continuously and proactively helping us monitor the product in production, understand the impact of releases e.g. performance drops or other impacts that might not hit a limit, but we’d like to be aware if we affect.
  • 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, and Accessibility, Scalability for your team how to go about doing these tests/monitoring them with continuous releases. Keep an eye out for the legal and compliance requirements too.
• Root Cause Analysis: Be an advocate for getting the team to do root cause analysis and postmortems of issues regularly. You should be able to understand the code structure enough to debug any issues that fall into the team so that you can understand where the problem could be and how to prioritize it.
• Advocate process improvements: Strong understanding of various methods of SDLC (Lean/Kanban), so that you can use the best ways to understand what works within the team’s context and help improve the processes. Innovate to improve current working practices/products/technologies in favor of better quality
• 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 trying to discover new tools and techniques in the QA space and share the knowledge with the QA team

In addition, we offer:

• Food allowance, € 7,63 EUR per working day via meal card
• 10% time, or ‘hack day’
• Access to LinkedIn Learning via our internal learning and development platform
• Free access to all SN Publications
• Private health insurance for you and your partner and children if applicable – Medis TOP + serious illnesses
• Personal accidents insurance for you
• Working from home policy
• Mobile device
• Travel costs for commute card up to max. € 40 per month

The position is located in Lisbon or Berlin. For Berlin, please enquire with the recruitment team to discuss benefits.

INTERVIEW / HIRING PROCESS DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC
To protect our candidates’ and interviewers’ health and wellbeing, all interviews will be on the phone and/or via video conferencing applications. If you are chosen to be interviewed, we’ll get in touch with the details.

If you are successful and are offered a position, we understand that you may wish to delay your start date; we are happy to be flexible and work with you on what suits you best. For now, all roles will be remote, but will move onsite when restrictions are lifted.

We have put in place a remote onboarding process to ensure new starters have all the equipment, knowledge and contacts they need to be able to start their new career.

You will have a dedicated contact during the recruitment process whom you can contact any questions on this.

The position is located in either Lisbon or Berlin, but internal applications are welcome and will be considered in the candidates’ locations, should the candidate fulfil all the requirements for the role.

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.