What are the responsibilities and job description for the Test Environment Specialist position at MSR Cosmos?
Role : Test Environment Specialist
Location : Dallas, TX Hybrid
Locals Only
Job description
An effective Test Environment Specialist will have strong interpersonal skills for engaging and working with stakeholders. They are adept at problem-solving, meticulous, and possess project management and adaptability skills. Most importantly, they are dedicated to ensuring high quality and making sure the test environment aligns with the testing requirements and are capable of monitoring test environment states. Additional technical know-how around designing, querying and configuring a robust test environment within a large-scale organization would be an added plus.
Engage with TEM Best Practices :
Environment flow and connection Documenting : Responsible for documenting the logical flow and connection points within the test environment from application to application, including hardware, network, and data flow configurations. Architecture diagrams of the specific components that make up the environments must be researched and kept up to date.
Environment Oversight : Automated tools should be used in ensuring that the test environments are consistently configured, and inter-dependencies are accounted for. Upstream and downstream connection points and contracts need to be documented and checked for status. Alerting should be in place for tracking environment disruptions.
Data management : Test data capabilities should be in place and accessible to ensure that any data needed to support automated testing accurately meets test case requirements using automated processes, either as part of a pre-configuration process or built into the automated testing scenarios themselves.
Monitoring and reporting : The test environment should be monitored regularly to ensure its performance and availability are meeting test execution needs and timelines, and to identify and report any problems or issues. Reports should be generated regularly to provide visibility into the status and performance of the test environments for the dependent projects to plan around.
Collaboration with development, program teams and operations : The test environment specialist should work closely with QMO, development, program teams and operations teams to ensure that the test environment supports everyone's needs and meets the requirements of their tests.
Regular Change and Incident monitoring : The test environments should be regularly maintained, upgraded, and configured to reflect all latest releases, and to ensure that they continue to align with the testing requirements of the related projects. Tracking Change Requests and Incidents that impact the QA environment up-time, both planned and un-planned, is critical.
Continuous improvement : The test environment should be regularly reviewed and improved, with an emphasis on ensuring its alignment with the planned testing project schedule and supporting the needs of the testing organization.
Must Have :
The ideal Test Environment Specialist must have these capabilities and experiences in place :
Experience coordinating efforts in test or production environments
Able to create flowcharts for infrastructure and logical flows
Understand and connecting the dots using flowcharts
Putting together Gantt charts on inter dependencies around the infrastructure
Working with big teams communicating plans
Building project plans and sharing risks and issues
Detailed documentation skills , capable of thoroughly communicating the logical and technical mapping of a test environment, including architectural diagrams and connection point dependencies.
Project management skills , capable of tracking calendar updates and plans across multiple large projects and scheduling across multiple different test environments.
Previous experience helping to manage environments on a large scale , this person will have had past experience in medium to large organizations helping to manage multiple large testing environments.
Excellent communication & collaboration skills , the capability to work directly with multiple different teams in the planning of large-scale software development / deployment projects. This person will meet regularly with Project Managers, Analysts, Test Engineers, and Leaders to gather detailed information and report on them.
Stakeholder Management , should have experience in managing project stakeholders and be able to balance their expectations with the reality of project constraints in a timely and professional manner.
Strategic Thinking , the ability to develop and implement long-term test environment management strategies is key.
Adaptability , have the ability to adapt to changing project requirements and the ability to quickly pivot and make decisions in a fast-paced work environment.
Experience in working with / on a change advisory board (CAB) , helping to make decisions around software and infrastructure deployments in terms priority and timing and understanding the impacts of those deployments to the environments being managed.
Capable of using and creating metric dashboards , the ability to display reports and dynamic dashboards to display various types of relevant metrics to convey complex details in easily digestible displays.
Problem tracking and resolution , capable of tracking incidents and planned change requests and helping to resolve any problems or blocking issues within the test environment. This includes diagnosing system wide problems, as well as managing resource constraints and ensuring that the test environment is available for testing when needed.
Test data management experience , capable of identifying specific test data requirements within a test project and past experience in coordinating test data capabilities and needs as they relate to managing a healthy QA environment.
Problem-Solving Skills, the ability to troubleshoot and identify potential root cause analysis on technical issues in a timely manner.
Nice to Have :
The ideal Test Environment Specialist is not required to have these skills, but will be considered an added bonus :
Coding / scripting technical skills : Familiarity with software development and testing processes, as well as knowledge of various testing tools, scripting or programming languages and platforms.
Hands on experience with system monitoring tools , hands on with system monitoring platforms and log analysis tools and be comfortable with using them to conduct some high-level root cause analysis.
Experience with test data creation , having spent time manipulating data sources or generating fully synthetic data records in support of test environments.
Experience with service mocking or virtual service creation and configuration.
Experience with API level scripting and searching , being able to query specific system APIs to pull some basic configuration and status information.
Experience with database querying , knowledge on directly searching with a DB to pull relevant information for problem resolution
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