Senior Manager, Quality Assurance at NCBA Group

JOB PURPOSE STATEMENT

The Senior Manager, Quality Assurance is responsible for the implementation of policies and procedures to ensure adherence to production quality standards, and audit processes, material and product testing against established standards and conducting continuous analysis of defects and deviations. The role holder will optimize processes to comply with existing and new requirements.

The position requires proven working experience in Testing Development and hand-on Software Development Lifecycle, Software Testing Lifecycle experience and team leadership as well as the ability to work as part of an agile team, managing competing priorities and ensure that quality is driven into the heart of the development process from requirements definition through to delivery.

KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES (DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES)

• Support the delivery and software development teams in understanding, defining and adhering to established processes.
• Ensuring compliance with process and work instructions by performing quality audits and reviews.
• Provide technical guidance for integrations and applications teams in the software development life cycle to ensure quality is embedded throughout the process.
• Track and report on quality KPIs.
• Contributing toward predictable delivery of quality releases
• Tracking and reporting of project progress from a quality point of view.
• Formulation and implementation of software testing strategies.
• Perform Code reviews
• Work with business and product development to develop functional and technical requirements and propose solutions to address these requirements.
• Make efficient use of source control and bug tracking systems
• Identify, analyse and report test results
• Ensure that all the assigned bank information technology platforms keep pace with technological innovations and developments as a way of protecting investment in technology.
• Evaluate, plan, and breakdown QA tasks and work packages in Software development Projects within agreed time constraints.
• Provide input into the development and maintenance of Business Continuity Plan and Data Security Plan for the Bank’s Software Platforms in order to guarantee continuation of services at all times.
• Knowledge Transfer on test automation frameworks to the application development and integration teams.
• Performs research and development to evaluate emerging technologies and their potential to optimize testing processes.
• Test code for robustness, including edge cases, usability and general reliability

JOB SPECIFICATIONS

Academic:

• A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or related field. A Master’s degree in Technology or Business-related course is an added advantage.

Desired work experience:

• Minimum 5 years’ experience in IT systems development within a highly digitized organization designing, implementing and managing mission critical systems, with at least 2 of those years within software testing.

JOB COMPETENCIES

Technical Competencies

• Experience in writing, executing and monitoring automated test suites using a variety of technologies such as Cucumber, Concordion, Selenium, Appium, Robotium, SoapUI, Jmeter
• Certification and experience implementing best practice frameworks e.g. ITIL, PRINCE2 
• Hands on experience in software development with major languages Java, Kotlin, C++, C# and practical experience using relation RDBMS e.g. Oracle and MS SQL etc.
• Strong understanding of SOA lifecycle, Integration patterns and standard methodologies.
• Knowledge of Linux/Unix commands and SQL will be required.
• Deep understanding of industry standard formats and protocols (JMS, SOAP, XML/XPath/XQuery, REST and JSON)
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills
• A good knowledge of the systems and processes within Financial Services industry
• Issue/bug tracking tools e.g. JIRA
• Use of continuous integration tools e.g. Gitlab CI/Jenkins
• Testing Automation

Behavioral Competencies

• Interpersonal Skills: Ability to lead, build and influence motivated teams
• Emotional Intelligence : Knows own strengths and limits; aware of own emotions and the effect they have on others and has the self-control to keep disruptive emotions and impulses in check.
• Social and Cross-cultural Awareness: Interacts with colleagues, customers, and other stakeholders in different social and cultural environments, showing respect and positive regard for them in an ethical and appropriate that are consistently with the values of the organization.
• Agile: Able to change plans, methods, opinions or goals in light of new information, with the readiness to act on opportunities. Highly effective in adapting to differing environments. Inculcates a digital mind-set in the organization, institutionalizing cross-functional collaboration, flattening hierarchies, devolving decision making to smaller teams, and building environments that creatively partnering with external companies to extend necessary capabilities to encourage the generation of new ideas and developing more iterative and rapid ways of doing things. Implements incentives and metrics to support such agility.
• Leadership Skills: Team Building and ability to train, develop and mentor staff; Presents new challenges and opportunities to the team to enable them to demonstrate and achieve their full potential; encourages and inspires team learning
• Negotiation Skills: Must be a good negotiator, particularly in changing behaviour and work practices but always achieve a Win/Win outcome
• Innovative: Creative and adaptive to change. A team player who is supportive of other’s ideas and innovations, collaborates in a culture of knowledge-sharing and team learning to strengthen the organization’s work