Lancing, England, United Kingdom
As a Software Engineering Leader in the John Lewis Partnership, I define and shape our quality culture and our broader engineering approaches. I shape resourcing in engineering product teams, mentor quality engineers and consult on test and risk mitigation approaches. As Principal Quality Engineer I help our amazing QEs land our quality culture and our continuous testing approaches in teams. I get personal reward and satisfaction from moving the dial on the hardest thing to budge in an organisations - its culture. I co-organise the Partnership supported engineering meetup, ENGINEERING WITH PURPOSE (meetup.com/squid_meetup)
As a Product Engineer across multiple delivery teams I mentor and support colleagues. I help them identify and grow skills they need in their teams in order to deliver customer value. In my roles as a champion of communities of interest I work with people from diverse backgrounds who want to either deepen their specialisms in or broaden their awareness of approaches that help speed up delivery whilst maintaining quality.
I was accountable for the testing conducted in the Supply Chain, Management Information, Retail and ePOS portfolios. Additionally I managed the development and delivery of the non-functional testing capability. I have four direct reports; two Portfolio Test Managers, the Non-Functional Test Manager and the Automation Test Manager. Jointly, with the Test Practice Lead I was responsible for the future vision of testing with in John Lewis IT and for implementing the roadmap that will see the department’s test capabilities be appropriate for the company’s transformational plans. I was also part of the vendor governance process, governing the relationship between John Lewis and our preferred test supplier.
As Portfolio Test Manager I ran two portfolios, Supply Chain, which deals with change in the company's 200+ supply chain systems; and Management Information, which deals with the evolving business intelligence needs of the company through the data warehouse, reporting and analysis solutions. I built both portfolios from scratch, there having been no centralised testing capability in these areas prior to my arrival at John Lewis.
I was accountable for the testing conducted in Bupa International’s agile delivery teams. I developed high level test approaches and created combined on and off shore teams for functional and non-functional testing. I was responsible for ensuring that the testing services gain and maintain the necessary skills to support and improve processes that lead to efficient and effective testing, and collaborative participation in the 19 delivery scrums.
I quality assured the system testing performed by an offshore third party and managed the user acceptance testing performed in house. Projects ranged up to budgets of up to £11 million. I created master test approaches in conjunction with the third party system test manager. I assured the work of the third party system testers. I managed, planned, monitored and reported on acceptance testing activities. I also acted as an internal L&G Test Management Consultant, managing the testing for two major programmes at an L&G wholly owned subsidiary company, Suffolk Life, leading to successful production implementations.
I led a team of 10 system test analysts, including functional testers, automation strategists, MI test analysts and SAP test analysts. I was responsible for producing test strategies and test plans, reviewing test scripts, monitoring and controlling test projects, and reviewing results. I contributed to weekly resource meetings, assessing current workload and the pipeline of future projects. I liaised with the business, business analysts, internal development teams, and third-party software developers. I introduced process improvement such as requirements traceability and requirements reviews. I also introduced risk-based testing in order to focus resources on what was important to the company.