What's the role?

We are seeking a passionate Automation expert who can contribute to the BDD transformation activities within Northwestern Mutual's Enterprise Test Engineering group.

The Automation Specialist (BDD) role reports to the Asst. Director of Enterprise Quality (EQ).

The Automation Specialist will assist in the setting up of the BDD testing framework and standards, educating and mentoring teams on BDD testing, including providing technical & process guidance.

The Automation Specialist will work with multiple scrum teams as the BDD Testing SME (Subject Matter Expert), will develop and strengthen internal/external relationships and establish cross-team partnerships to deliver on quality goals.

Your high-level milestones for the first year are the following:

• Within three months, analyze the current enterprise landscape, process and maturity levels and recommend improvements around strategy, methodology, framework etc. for BDD Testing.
• Within six months lead and facilitate BDD workshops/trainings across the Test Engineering group and provide technical and process guidance on implementing BDD.
• Within one year, become the BDD testing evangelist for the Enterprise Test Engineering group.

Bring Your Best! What this role needs:

• Deep knowledge and understanding of Agile concepts including Scrum and Kanban.
• Ability to review current test processes, artifacts, reports, tools and metrics to identify gaps from the perspective of a mature BDD implementation.
• Ability to coach, influence and build relationships with scrum teams to promote adoption of BDD testing process, tools and best practices. Assist in scrum teams' efforts to adhere to the guidelines and best practices of Enterprise BDD strategy and standards.
• Strong communication and influencing skills with all the key stakeholders to ensure the enterprise BDD vision is understood and implemented correctly.
• Should be "hands-on" technically. Provide technical direction and support to multiple teams, increasing their productivity and effectiveness by sharing deep knowledge and expertise in BDD testing.
• Utilize compliance and quality metrics to improve quality standards as part of the regular continuous improvement efforts.
• Awareness of Industry trends and solutions around Test Automation, BDD etc. Focus on continuous improvements including usage of appropriate tools, techniques etc.
• Participate in interviews, onboarding and training activities as required.

Desired Skills:

The ideal skillset we are looking for:

• Minimum of 10 years of experience in Software Testing/Quality Assurance. Expert in Software Testing concepts, Test Automation and Test Process Improvements in Agile/DevOps setting.
• Around 2 years of "hands-on" experience in BDD. Experienced in BDD tools like Cucumber (preferred) / SpecFlow. Test automation experience using Cucumber (Selenium Webdriver Integration) and Gherkin scripting language.
• Minimum 3 years of hands on experience in developing automated scripts using Selenium (Java), Appium, TestNG, JUnit etc. Experience in designing and customizing Test automation frameworks.
• Experience in CI/CD/Continuous testing setup using toolset like Jenkins, Bamboo, Maven, Git/GitHub, Subversion etc.
• Exposure to Test management tools like Jira/X-Ray/AgileCraft will be a plus.
• Excellent Written and verbal communication skills.
• Collaborative team player. Proven ability to contribute in a team-oriented environment.