BBC Jobs 2023 – Senior Tester

About the job

Job Introduction

The BBC’s Children’s & Education team deliver amazing digital experiences that inform, educate, entertain and inspire the nation’s children.

We provide some of the UK’s most popular websites and apps, which bring to life the globally renowned CBeebies and CBBC brands.

Our Apps Are Consistently In The Top 5 Of Their Categories In The App Stores (see Link Below For Example)

Our apps are some of the most popular for kids.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.uk.co.bbc.cbeebiesstorytime&hl=en_GB

We Have Over 350+ Interactive Experiences Across BBC Online, Powered By Our Internally Built Game Engines (see Link Below For Example)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/games/embed/gmm269xwnq?exitGameUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fcbbc%2Fgames%2Fdanger-mouse-game%3Fcollection%3Dcbbc-top-games

Some Of Our Digital Interactive Experiences Are Shared Between Both Our CBeebies Flagship Website And Our Children’s Apps And Are Delivered By 3rd Party Game Engineering Companies (see The Link Below For An Example)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/games/embed/cbeebies-hey-duggee-paddling-badge-race?exitGameUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fcbeebies%2Fgames%2Fhey-duggee-the-paddling-badge-game%3Fcollection%3Dfun-activities-for-toddlers-and-preschoolers

About

We call this the Universal App Platform (UAP), and you can read more about it in the blog post below

Our 4 flagship apps and 350+ interactive experiences are all powered by the same platform. This allows us to build multi platform experiences with a single codebase using modern web technologies.

https://medium.com/bbc-design-engineering/shipping-progressive-web-apps-everywhere-190a421c606a?source=collection_home—5——5———————–

Our department is structured in to cross-functional, agile teams, who are focussed on creating world-class experiences for our young audience.

Role Responsibility

We’re looking for a highly enthusiastic and self-motivated Senior Tester to work in our BBC Children’s App product team.

As a member of this product team you will be responsible for ensuring that the Cbeebies apps we build meet the requirements and quality criteria of our department.

As a senior tester you will be expected to lead in the development of a testing strategy and to coach and mentor more junior colleagues. We are a team that strives for TDD practices, so you will be encouraged to pair with developers in implementing test scenarios and to be proactive in identifying opportunities for test automation. You’ll be involved in making technical decisions to improve testing strategies across the team. As a team we aim to embed testing sooner in to our processes in order to drive quality and minimise risk.

To ensure long-term success you will embrace change and have a desire to learn new technologies and a passion for innovation. Our team spans multiple sites (in this case Glasgow and Salford), so you will be comfortable with the challenges of collaborating with colleagues remotely.

The successful applicant will be responsible for ensuring the products are released to the highest quality through the usability experience, highlighting risks early and mitigating possible defects. You’ll have an appreciation of good user experience and be prepared to advocate for users. You will be proactive in pursuing critical bugs and seeing them through to resolution. While working with Testers, Software Engineers, and wider project teams, you’ll be a strong advocate for quality across the engineering process, guiding and supporting teams to successfully adopt and implement best practice in their ways of working.

Are you the right candidate?

It’s essential that you are someone who is keen to learn and eager to develop new skills. You have experience of all forms of testing, i.e. integration testing, functional testing, negative testing, regression testing, deployment testing, automated testing, exploratory testing, performance testing, cross browsers testing, etc. You strive to keep abreast of the developments in testing approaches / methodologies, particularly those related to mobile devices and the web.

In this role you will report to the Software Engineering Team Lead and you will be supported in your role by a Principal Tester. It’s important that you can collaborate as part of a multidisciplinary team and can coach and mentor junior team members.

The successful individual will have experience of owning automation projects alongside feature work, have examples where they have had to problem solve and think creatively or innovatively, as well as have strong organisational skills to effectively manage their workload and priorities.

Over The Next 12 Months You Will

• Work within an agile environment to plan and execute tests, using the most appropriate test approach, to ensure that the software delivered is as per requirements, fit-for-purpose and performant.
• Collaborate with product owners, business analysts, UX designers and developers to test end to end user journeys and scenarios.
• Provide subject matter expertise and best practices for test automation and assisting in designing/implementing automation frameworks for new and existing applications.
• Create and maintain robust and reusable tests and fixtures to the highest standard.
• Ensure that a high level of test coverage is achieved and maintained.

Skills & Experience

Essentials

• Experience of working in an Agile environment and Agile project management tools such as Jira.
• Experience of working closely with Software Engineers and product stakeholders.
• Good manual testing skills, with experience of smoke testing, functional testing, regression testing and exploratory testing across a range of both web and mobile platforms and devices
• Test automation experience using Cypress. Setting up test environments, mocked data etc.
• Browser performance testing using Web vitals, Lighthouse and other tools.
• Familiarity with JavaScript, TDD.
• Experience of Defect Management including analysis and triage
• Experience of writing automated acceptance tests

Desirable

• Experience with mobile native testing libraries like Appium or WebDriverIO
• Experience of cloud-based environments, especially AWS
• Understanding of continuous integration and deployment methodologies as well as CI/CD tools like Jenkins
• Experience working within a multi-site team or department
• Experience of writing unit tests
• Experience of performance testing and mobile app profiling tools
• Basic Test Lead experience i.e. mentoring Junior Testers
• Good knowledge on a variety of testing approaches that can be used in a hybrid app context
• Experience of Visual Studio Code, Android Studio, XCode

What’s important to us in Children’s & Education:

• We are a diverse team that prioritises collaboration
• We have a track record of developing our staff, and participating in schemes to boost diversity, graduates/apprentices/Step Into Tech are important to us
• We strive for self organising teams, and empower Software Engineers to take part in all aspects of the product
• We care about quality, with extensive automation, and TDD practices
• Data powered decision making – looking at real user information and using that to choose what to do next
• We work collaboratively within the department and beyond, looking to deliver joined up solutions where we can
• We value our people, offering 10% development time, a good work life balance and flexible working opportunities

Package Description

Band: D

Contract type: Permanent

Location: Salford (1 – 2 days working from the office will be necessary)

We’re happy to discuss flexible working. Please indicate your choice under the flexible working question in the application . There is no obligation to raise this at the application stage but if you wish to do so, you are welcome to. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.

• Excellent career progression – the BBC offers great opportunities for employees to seek new challenges and work in different areas of the organisation.
• Unrivalled training and development opportunities – our in-house Academy hosts a wide range of internal and external courses and certification.
• Benefits – We offer a competitive salary package, a flexible 35-hour working week for work-life balance and 26 days (1 of which is a corporation day) with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a defined pension scheme and discounted dental, health care, gym and much more.

About The BBC

We do not focus simply on what we do, we also care how we do it. Our values and the way we behave are important to us. Please make sure you have read about our values and behaviours in the document attached below.

Diversity matters at the BBC. We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual’s unique contribution, enabling all of our employees to thrive and achieve their full potential.

We want to attract the broadest range of talented people to be part of the BBC whether that is to contribute to our programming or our wide range of non-production roles. The more diverse our workforce, the better able we are to respond to and reflect our audiences in all their diversity.

We are committed to equality of opportunity and welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief. We will consider flexible working requests for all roles, unless operational requirements prevent otherwise.

To find out more about Diversity and Inclusion at the BBC, please click here