Contract QA Analyst Role for Nashville, TN

Describe the role:The Senior Quality Assurance Analyst will manage the testing program for the Private Client team. This role will support testing in an agile, dynamic environment. It will include developing a testing strategy, managing a testing team, supervising test automation, and ensuring quality delivery of projects. The person in this role will liaise with business partners, business analysts and systems developers to ensure effective test plans and cases. In addition, the Senior Quality Assurance Analyst will facilitate communication with stakeholders, ensuring that all are informed on testing progress and outcomes. The Senior Quality Assurance Analyst must be adept both at traditional QA best practices (analyzing business requirements and creating test plans for their verification) and agile methodology (working closely with users and developers to create test cases as new functionality emerges). In support of both approaches, this role will leverage both manual and automated testing techniques.

The key job r

esponsibilities for this role include, but are not limited to:

• Collaborate with software developers, project managers, business analysts, and business partners to understand and analyze business requirements for projects
• Break down business requirements into functional components to document test plans and test scripts to verify application functionality
• Develop plans for both automated and manual functional, integration, and regression tests and ensure that tests are successfully completed prior to production
• Lead Functional, Compatibility and Regression test execution across various environments
• Report and track defects and issues and communicate results to the project team and senior management
• Evaluate upstream/downstream/parallel components to identify and mitigate potential areas of risk
• Manage offshore QA team members to assist in test case development for new functionality and regression testing
• Actively participant in process improvements initiatives, voice project concerns and impacts
• Act as an advocate for the end user experience

job Qualifications (The ideal candidate should have the following):Qualifications, Experience, and Education:• BS in Computer Science, Math, Engineering, Economics or related major• Minimum of 6 years’ experience in a Quality Assurance position in support of financial trading and/or portfolio management applications in equity instruments• The candidate must have experience in structured testing methodology, with a proven ability to breakdown business requirements into functional components • Experienced project leader with ability to formulate testing strategies with limited availability of documentation or support• The candidate must also be strong in documenting test plans and test scripts to verify application functionality• The candidate must have excellent communication, interpersonal and client interaction skills as they will be required to work closely with business analysts, a diverse group of users, IT senior management and application developers, to develop test strategies and to help define, organize, and evolve the QA practice into a more structured discipline• Familiarity with the concepts and application of automated test tool technologies (Framework concepts, Unified Functional Test, Test Complete, Selenium, etc.) to effectively contribute to planning out automated testing strategies• Experience with relational database technology, SQL queries and SQL programming• Knowledge of equities trading concepts, industry practices and workflows are vital, especially in the areas of portfolio optimization, as well as equity and mutual fund trading• Keen understanding of SDLC and STLC in both a traditional waterfall or an agile software development setting Skills:• Excellent verbal and written communication skills are a requirement for this role• Detail oriented, self-starter and a team player• Demonstrated analytical and problem-solving skills • Experience writing, managing, and executing end to end test plans and test cases• Ability to influence and persuade team members when needed• Experience leading and working with offshore teams• Experience working with Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), JIRA or similar tools for managing regression testing and defect tracking• Ability to manage multiple, competing tasks to meet deadlines in a rapidly changing environment• Familiarity with order management and trading applications in the equity brokerage or asset management space• Experienced project leader with ability to formulate testing strategies with limited availability of documentation or support• Prior supervisory responsibility over a small team is preferred