Role: Test Manager
Location: London, UK
Is it Permanent / Contract: Permanent
Is it Onsite/Remote/Hybrid: Hybrid
Start Date: Only Immediate Joiners or candidates with max 2 weeks’ notice.
Job Description:
Test Manager – General Insurance Transformation (Duck Creek / Guidewire Upgrade)
Role Summary
Seeking an experienced Test Manager with deep General Insurance domain knowledge and proven experience leading large-scale transformation programmes—specifically upgrades of Duck Creek or Guidewire platforms. The role owns test strategy and delivery across multiple test streams (functional, regression, integration, UAT, non-functional), defines automation and test data strategies, manages risk and stakeholders, and brings an engineering mindset to accelerate quality through automation (including Playwright), shift-left practices, and continuous testing.
Key Responsibilities
- Define and own the end-to-end test strategy for Duck Creek or Guidewire upgrade programmes, aligning to programme timelines, release trains, and business priorities.
- Lead test planning, estimation and scheduling across multiple teams and workstreams to ensure on-time delivery.
- Drive a risk-based testing approach; identify, assess and mitigate testing risks, and maintain a living test risk register.
- Design and implement the Automation Strategy focusing on UI and API automation; champion tools, frameworks, CI/CD integration, and re-usable libraries.
- Lead Playwright adoption and implementation for modern web UI automation, including best practices for resilience, parallel execution, cross-browser testing, and integration with pipelines.
- Define and lead Non-Functional Testing (NFT) strategy covering performance, load, scalability, security, and accessibility testing; coordinate with platform and infra teams for environments and tooling.
- Define Test Data Management (TDM) strategy: data profiling, synthetic data generation, masking, subset selection, and environment refresh cadence to support all test stages.
- Drive test environment strategy, including environment provisioning, configuration management, and service virtualization/mock services for dependent integrations.
- Implement a Test Engineering mindset: promote shift-left testing, testability by design, contract testing, continuous feedback, and test-driven development where applicable.
- Manage stakeholder relationships across business, product owners, solution and integration architects, infrastructure teams, vendors (Duck Creek/Guidewire integrators), and third-party suppliers.
- Coordinate vendor/supplier test activities, validate vendor deliverables (fixes, patches), and ensure vendor acceptance testing artifacts meet programme standards.
- Oversee defect management lifecycle and ensure effective triage processes; implement quality gates and release criteria.
- Establish metrics and reporting for test progress, quality, coverage, defect trends and automation ROI; present status and risks to senior stakeholders and steering committees.
- Coach, mentor and build test capability across the programme; recruit and lead distributed QA teams, including test leads, automation engineers, performance engineers and TDM specialists.
- Execute regression and upgrade-specific testing activities: baseline regression packs, compatibility testing, data migration validation, cutover rehearsals, and post-go-live verification.
Required Technical & Domain Skills
- Extensive experience in General Insurance testing and functional understanding of policy, billing, claims, rating and endorsement workflows.
- Proven delivery experience on Duck Creek or Guidewire upgrade projects (major version upgrades, line-of-business migrations, or large patch-upgrades).
- Hands-on experience with Playwright for web UI automation: test authoring, debugging, parallel execution, cross-browser testing, test flakiness mitigation strategies, and CI integration.
- Strong automation knowledge across UI and API layers; experience with modern frameworks, asynchronous testing, test harness creation, and integration with CI/CD tools (Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, etc.).
- Experience with API testing tools and frameworks (Postman, REST-assured, or similar) and service virtualization approaches.
- TDM experience: data masking, subsetting, synthetic data generation, and TDM approaches
- Non-functional testing experience: performance/load testing tools (JMeter, LoadRunner or similar) and security testing awareness.
- Familiar with modern test tooling ecosystem: test case management, defect tracking (JIRA), reporting, and test orchestration.
- Experience integrating automated tests into CI pipelines for continuous validation and release gating.
- Familiarity with cloud environments, containerization and infrastructure-as-code concepts that impact test environments.
Leadership & Programme Experience
- Demonstrated experience leading testing within large transformation programmes (multiple streams, multi-vendor ecosystems, and geo-distributed teams).
- Strong stakeholder management and communication skills, with experience presenting to executive-level steering committees.
- Proven ability to build and scale testing capability, institute best practices, and transform legacy QA approaches into engineering-led continuous testing models.
Desired Certifications & Qualifications
- Relevant degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
- Certifications are advantageous: ISTQB (Advanced/Expert), Agile Testing, Certified ScrumMaster or Kanban), Duck Creek/Guidewire product certifications (if available).
- Playwright training or proof of large-scale Playwright implementation is highly desirable.
Success Criteria & KPIs
- Reduction in production defects related to upgraded modules and integrations.
- Increase in automated test coverage for critical business flows (UI and API) and measurable automation ROI.
- Timely completion of regression cycles and successful cutover rehearsals with minimal rollbacks.
- Effective mitigation of identified test risks and smooth stakeholder sign-off for releases.
- Shorter feedback loops through CI integration and higher proportion of automated gate checks.
Typical Deliverables
- Comprehensive Test Strategy and Test Plan for the upgrade programme.
- Automation strategy with Playwright implementation plan and framework artifacts.
- NFT and TDM strategies and operational runbooks.
- Test schedules, estimates, resource plan and traceability matrices.
- Test cases, automated test suites, environment and data provisioning scripts.
- Regular test reports, dashboards and risk/runs summaries for governance.
Personal Attributes
- Strong problem-solving and analytic capability with an engineering-first approach.
- Excellent communicator: able to translate technical risk into business impact and vice versa.
- Collaborative leadership style, able to influence across functions and vendors.
- Resilient and adaptable in high-pressure transformation delivery environments.