Description
The System QA Lead is accountable for system level quality, integrated testing orchestration, and readiness evidence across the Agile Release Train (ART). This role ensures deployment and release decisions are driven by explicit, risk-based validation and visible evidence, not late-stage testing or assumptions.
Responsibilities:
System Level Quality Ownership: Own system level quality outcomes for the ART, ensuring the integrated solution is validated end to end. Ensure system level testing validates integration and readiness and does not compensate for missing team level verification. Provide a single point of accountability for ART level quality visibility and decision support.
Scenario Governance & Must Pass Coverage: Own and maintain the ART must pass scenario catalog, ensuring scenarios reflect business intent, deployment scope, and risk. Curate, prioritize, and evolve scenarios based on escaped defects, deployment outcomes, and PI learning. Ensure scenarios are executed consistently and results are recorded as readiness evidence.
System & Regression Test Orchestration: Orchestrate system integration testing, end to end business scenario execution, and ART level regression in integrated environments (primarily QA). Coordinate trigger-based regression execution (build, QA deploy, prerelease), ensuring failures are routed to owning teams for remediation. Ensure regression coverage is layered, risk based, and scalable, not monolithic.
Readiness Evidence & Deployment Support: Own deployment, release, and feature flag readiness reporting, consolidating evidence for Sprint 2 and Sprint 4 deployments. Ensure readiness decisions are based on explicit evidence, including: regression outcomes, must pass scenario execution, feature flag ON/OFF validation, documented risks and waivers. Support GO / GO with risk / NO GO decision forums with clear quality signals.
Defect Triage & Risk Visibility: Coordinate system level defect triage, ensuring ownership, prioritization, and visibility of cross-team issues. Track and surface systemic quality risks and integration issues to ART leadership. Ensure explicit risk acceptance is documented when defects or gaps are waived.
Environment & Test Data Oversight: Track QA and UA environment stability and test data readiness as ART level risks or impediments. Reinforce correct environment usage: QA as the primary integrated environment for functional confidence, UA for selective business validation, UA1, Batlab, and Production for deploy/ops verification only. Partner with DevOps and teams to resolve environment and data issues impacting system validation.
Continuous Improvement & Inspect & Adapt: Consolidate quality inputs for Inspect & Adapt, including escaped defects, regression effectiveness, scenario coverage gaps, and environment issues. Drive ART level quality improvements with named owners and funded capacity each PI. Ensure learning results in measurable, planned change rather than ad hoc fixes.
Collaboration & Enablement: Partner closely with: System Automation Tester on suite health, automation standards, and expansion, Product Management and Business Owners on outcome validation and risk acceptance, RTE on quality visibility, capacity funding, and escalation of systemic risks, Provide guidance and coaching on system level quality expectations and evidence standards.
Success Measures: Deployment and release decisions are supported by clear, trusted readiness evidence. Must pass scenarios accurately reflect business critical flows and are consistently executed. System level defects and risks are visible early and owned by the correct teams. Quality improvement actions are planned, funded, and completed each PI.