Junior QA Engineer

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The Role:

Artesian has a small and focused software engineering team based in Winnersh in Berkshire; we are looking for a fellow software enthusiast who can provide a positive contribution to our QA team helping us develop and deliver new and innovative internet & social media surveillance products. The key conceptual areas that we develop in include, text mining, Internet-scale data, sentiment analysis, NLP, ranking algorithms, SaaS and analytics. We use the full suite of MS development tools as well as some superb open source projects, this list would include: Visual Studio, dotNet 4.0, Lucene.net, Subversion, Jira, SQL server and many others. Core programming languages and frameworks would include C#, WCF/WPF, MVC 3 and jQuery among others and for data persistence we use SQL Server 2005/8 as well as other more innovative NoSQL solutions such as Cassandra.

This role reports to the QA manager

Responsibilities:

  • Working with project teams to agree a consistent approach to Quality Assurance, identifying any risks and dependencies.
  • Working with technical leads and product managers to review project documentation such as functional requirements and technical specifications
  • Reviewing requirements, participating in product design reviews and work with business and development team to make any design improvements and refinement.
  • Identify, write and implement test strategy and plans according to project documentation technologies and development methodologies.
  • Assessing need and return on investment for automated regression testing for the project. Selecting the appropriate automation tools if appropriate
  • Creating and executing automated tests.
  • Estimating the number of resources required to deliver project and/also providing estimates & timescales for testing tasks on projects.
  • Identifying test conditions from project documentation and developing test cases and test scripts to cover those conditions.
  • Planning, managing, executing test cases, recording test results.
  • Participating in the development and delivery of testing including: functional testing, integration testing and regression testing as well as automated testing and UAT etc.
  • Defect tracking and management, working with development teams to identify root cause and resolve issues.
  • Update project manager with status of testing / issues on a regular basis (both informal communication and written reports).
  • Managing the configuration management and deployment procedures for releasing code to test and live environments.
  • Mentoring of junior team members.

Expected Skills & Experience:

  • Over 12 months commercial experience in a software testing role, ideally including web based solutions.
  • Experience of the full software testing lifecycle including smoke testing, functional/regression testing, integration testing and UAT.
  • Good understanding of common technologies such as internet applications, databases, browsers and client technologies etc.
  • Experience of testing User Interface testing.
  • Knowledge of web accessibility guidelines and common cross browser issues
  • Experience of using automation to support manual testing.
  • Thorough and accurate with good attention to detail.
  • A self-starter, able to prioritize tasks and manage own time effectively in a fast paced environment.

Desirable Skills & experience:

  • Experience of non-functional testing such as performance, load or security testing.
  • Experience of testing on projects using an agile methodology.
  • Knowledge of SAAS (Software as a service) environments, hosted solutions and WEB based solutions would be ideal.
  • Ability to communicate effectively at technical and business levels with excellent negotiation skills.
  • Enthusiastic and quick learner, able to learn new methodologies and software applications/technologies and understand client requirements
  • ISEB foundation certificate in software testing.
  • Ability to interact and build strong relationships with diversely skilled individuals.
  • Able to communicate effectively and persuasively to different audiences.



Being in the technical team at Artesian

At artesian we believe in nurturing a relaxed physical and intellectual environment for developers that encourages innovation. We positively encourage people to participate in the development process by contributing their ideas and experience, helping us improve both our products and the way we build them. We have a great relationship with Microsoft having recently graduated from their exclusive Bizspark One program; this means that we often get to explore technologies prior to mass market betas or GA releases. The landscape that we develop our software in is at the forefront of internet scale software engineering, we harness the huge volumes and throughputs of social media, news and other unstructured content to deliver focused and valuable business intelligence to our subscribers. It’s a hot R&D area with recent acquisitions by Salesforce.com and SAP showing that for the company who figures out how to convert the ever growing corpus of internet and social media content into identifiable business advantage the future is very bright indeed.

Despite gloomy macro-economic conditions, Artesian is growing rapidly; subsequently, career development opportunities are ripe for the right individuals. Advancement could include moving upwards in the technical disciplines (for example architecture & product management) as well as laterally into QA, technical consulting, technical sales or even operational management as we expand our operations.


To register your interest in this role, please send us your CV.