Summary:
AutoZone is a dynamic, fast-faced business environment. We are looking for an inquisitive, motivated and dedicated Senior User Acceptance Testing (UAT) Analyst, who will ensure our customers and employees have a great experience on AutoZone’s integrated digital platforms including our websites, mobile apps, 3rd party integrated systems and employee facing systems. While all UAT roles at AutoZone require a combination of UAT leadership, collaboration, project management, retail/ operations/ technical know-how, critical thinking and strong communication skills, the Senior UAT Analyst pushes AutoZone towards excellence and best in class UAT practices. We are looking for people that have a user-centered perspective and are passionate about our customers and delivering an excellent customer experience.
Responsibilities:
As a Senior UAT Analyst, you will lead and execute user-centered acceptance testing efforts to ensure a quality solution and a great experience is delivered for AutoZone customers and/or employees. Your test designs and test explorations will focus on the user experience, not just the requirements. You will collaborate with multiple teams like Product Management, UX/ UI Design and Engineering teams as well as UAT vendors to stitch together and drive overall UAT and digital results. You will observe customers and AutoZoners interacting with digital solutions as well as review UX research and digital analytics to contextualize the customer journey in order to optimize UAT test scenarios and coverage.
Your technical and process expertise will be needed to uncover user experience issues. You will personally strategize, review, execute as well as provide direction to UAT Analyst, UAT vendors on regression, new feature, exploratory and automation UAT testing. You will regularly consolidate and interpret UAT results, create metrics and report on findings and trends to relevant audiences for review, resolution and further analysis. By identifying defects/issues with good customer experience test scenarios, your results along with the rest of the UAT team and vendors will be a compliment to the more functional testing performed by the Quality Engineering (QE) team.
Improvement of overall UAT productivity while lowering the defect rate through each stage of testing will be a key focus area for you. You will accomplish this by reviewing, writing and maintaining good coverage of test scripts and user data scenarios while working to reduce manual testing effort through automation. With an understanding of creating the UAT automation framework, you will work to provide automation test requirements in collaboration with the UAT team, QE and vendors. You will review and provide direction for the scripts written by Analyst and UAT Vendor teammates
Lastly, you will drive, prioritize and collaborate with the rest of the UAT team and vendors to shape UAT processes in-line with best-in-class industry practices. This UAT Center of Excellence will take AutoZone’s UAT to the next level and will require that you stay abreast of the latest UAT best practices, share your findings/ recommendations as well as take on some leadership of some aspects of the plan. As the Center of Excellence plan becomes established, you will support the execution of new practices, processes and plans. Finally, Present your recommendation and approach to the AutoZone leadership
What We Expect:
Leadership
- Effectively communicate test strategies, plans, status and challenges for digital projects
- Help develop and track UAT metrics to operate in a mode of continuous improvement to ensure that AutoZone is meeting customer needs
- Lead and facilitate UAT processes with a passion for delivering a great user experience to our customers
- Stay abreast of current evolving technology and UAT best practices/ strategies and review it for its applicability for use in AutoZone digital and UAT testing
- Lead or attend meetings as a representative of the UAT team and voice of customer
- Mentor team members and third-party resources for successful delivery of the project
- Lead major aspects of the UAT Center of Excellence and push team to bring AutoZone UAT to the next level
- Provide thought leadership to UAT and DX management through informal and formal communications about releases, UAT processes and UAT initiatives.
Project Management
- Create resource and timing estimates for UAT work
- Create UAT test strategies and plans
- Lead several medium to large UAT delivery execution processes collaborating with key stakeholders as well as UAT team members and vendors
- Prioritize and multi-task the job on hand
- Assist in managing external 3rd party vendors that support the UAT process to ensure they deliver desired results
Analysis and Follow Up
- Perform root cause analysis of high impact issues and trace back to missed requirements or failed code deliverables
- Apply tactics to identify and reduce recurring defect themes. Work closely with UX research to understand customer pain points and create user journey scenarios.
- Ability to quickly interpret requests and translate them into test scenarios
- Maintain a strong subject matter expertise in a variety of retail and digital eCommerce business processes
- Create and review UAT reports including defect trends, retrospective reports and provide recommendations for solutions
- Creation of plans to resolve defects, issues, process problems and UAT improvements. Execute and follow up on those plans with key stakeholders.
Collaborate
- Collaborate with the Digital business team, Product Management team, UI and UX teams to ensure that the business/ product and customer journey goals align with test scripts and plans
- Collaborate with QA test teams, vendors, front and back-end engineers, development operations, agile scrum masters and IT project management to deliver projects to market
- Collaborate with Marketing and Content teams to deliver the right content to our websites and to ensure that eMails to customers are working properly
- Collaborate with research and analytics to identify customer pain points and current browser/device trends
- Provide thought leadership and collaborate with the rest of the UAT team and vendors to shape UAT processes in-line with best-in-class industry practices
- Partner with Enterprise QE team for the automation script writing and manual functional validation
Test Cases
- Observe customers and AutoZoners interacting with digital solutions as well as review UX research and digital analytics to contextualize the customer journey in order to optimize UAT test scenarios and coverage.
- Ensure that the User Acceptance test scripts are written and executed in a controlled state, following good validation methodology
- Create traceability matrix for good test coverage includes UI validation, functional UAT scenarios that includes customer user journey
- Develop acceptance test and postproduction validation cases for functional changes and regression scenarios with pass/fail criteria
- Ensuring that the user acceptance test script writing and execution processes are defined, documented and implemented to meet the needs of the user community
- Contribute to the development and maintenance of test case library by reviewing existing cases, making changes and updates as required
- Review UAT analyst and vendor test cases ensuring sufficient coverage of the customer journey and related data / UI scenarios.
- Oversee, Input and maintain test scripts, data scenarios and results in JIRA
- Provide leadership and plans to improve of overall UAT productivity while lowering the defect rate through each stage of testing
Execution
- You will personally execute as well as provide direction to UAT vendors on regression, new feature, exploratory and automation UAT testing.
- Validate to ensure that the product has the desired impact and is meeting customer needs
- Execute thorough UAT testing including automated and manual test cases
- Identifying visual and technical defects within the systems and provide detailed explanation and examples
- Review regression testing results and certify product for UAT
- Provide recommendations to business team for Go/ No Go release decisions based on sound UAT testing inclusive of functional testing, regression testing and ADA/ accessibility compliance
- Work with the Engineering and UX teams resolve and retest defects in order to produce a viable release candidate that passes criteria for launch
- Conduct postproduction validation (PPV) of development projects to maintain accuracy and functionality of systems and processes
- As the Center of Excellence plan becomes established, you will support the execution of new practices, processes and plans.
Automation
- Write complex automated test scripts
- Execute and interpret Automation tests for AutoZone’s Digital properties
- Work to increase the % of automated UAT test cases so that team can focus on more strategic testing and defect follow up
- Create automation test data with good test coverage
- Contribute to the creation and review of an automation framework for future testing that increases efficiency and avoids duplication of work
- Create Automation test and data strategy to identify issues in the application
What You Should Bring to the Table:
- Thought leadership on UAT
- Self-starter with who has the curiosity, capacity and tech savvy to understand complex, integrated systems
- Dedicated with the ability to combine critical thinking, problem solving with hands-on execution
- Detail-oriented, with strong analytical and problem-solving skills
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills which cater to both technical and functional audiences
- Extensive knowledge of testing applications and defect tracking systems
- Proven track record for delivering, managing and launching large-scale technical projects including major website platform
- Experience with established automation frameworks as well as writing and executing automated test scripts
- Knowledge of ADA compliance, validation methodology, strategy, testing and documentation requirements
- Team player with strong interpersonal and collaboration skills
- Process-oriented with a drive for operational excellence
- Ability to work with shifting priorities to meet project requirements; self-motivated
- Familiarity with retail operations and digital eCommerce processes (a plus)
- Ability to work cross functionally to ensure site change objectives are consistent with requirements
- Present the strategies and improvements to UAT management and leadership team
Requirements:
- Bachelor’s Degree in Science, Technology or Engineering; Master’s degree preferred
- Minimum of 5 - 7 years of quality assurance experience or UAT experience in a web development and/or application software development environment
- Minimum of 4 years of functional automation skills
- Proven experience as a Quality Assurance Tester or similar role
- High degree of technical knowledge and testing and validation skills required
- Working knowledge of regulatory and compliance requirements, specifically ADA compliance
- Ability to lead 2-3 medium to large sized UAT efforts and interface with UAT and DX Leadership and key stakeholders
- Working knowledge of test management software (e.g., QC / ALM / JIRA / Zephyr)
- Selenium with Java/Java Script, TestNG, Git Lab, Maven is plus
Some other things that would definitely make a strong impression on us:
- Cool projects that aren't part of your job (i.e., hobby projects, a GitHub profile)
- Advanced degree in Computer Science or a related field
- You've worked with very large datasets and/or retail/eCom experience