Methods Business and Digital Technology Limited

Methods is a £100M+ IT Services Consultancy who has partnered with a range of central government departments and agencies to transform the way the public sector operates in the UK. Established over 30 years ago and UK-based, we apply our skills in transformation, delivery, and collaboration from across the Methods Group, to create end-to-end business and technical solutions that are people-centred, safe, and designed for the future.

Our human touch sets us apart from other consultancies, system integrators and software houses - with people, technology, and data at the heart of who we are, we believe in creating value and sustainability through everything we do for our clients, staff, communities, and the planet.

We support our clients in the success of their projects while working collaboratively to share skill sets and solve problems. At Methods we have fun while working hard; we are not afraid of making mistakes and learning from them.

Predominantly focused on the public-sector, Methods is now building a significant private sector client portfolio.

Methods was acquired by the Alten Group in early 2022.

Methods is driven by a desire to improve public services for the benefit of all the people who use them, leveraging current technologies to deliver user centred solutions and having an internal culture that allows our staff to express themselves and be innovative.

The Technical Delivery and Software Engineering team here at Methods is currently a small friendly team split across London, Cardiff and Birmingham. We are looking to scale up our team to meet our clients' growing demand to deliver quality solutions. As part of the team, you may be required to travel within the UK to meet and work with clients.

As a Test Engineer you will work with our clients and perform high quality functional and non-functional testing on complex systems and applications. You must be familiar with Agile practices and tools and able to work in fast paced CI/CD environment. You will be proactive, looking for ways to improve the test processes and automated tests to make them more efficient.

You will work closely with developers, Devops engineers and business stakeholders (operations, incident management and product management) to understand the positive and negative impact software can have on end users and provide accurate updates on the progress and outcomes of testing.

Responsibilities:

• Take a user centred approach to programme, project or sprint level quality assurance and testing activities, providing practical, risk-based solutions including formal test analysis, design and exploratory or experience-based methods
• Maintain automated testing tool + test scripts, promoting best practices within the development team.
• Proactively look for ways to improve/expand the existing test automation suite.
• Carry out functional, non-functional, regression, and user acceptance testing
• Maintain close working relationships with business areas, such as operations, incident management and product management to understand the positive and negative impact software can have on end users
• Work with other test engineers on QAT activities, focusing on complex problem-solving and influencing senior team members and senior customer stakeholders alike and establishing best practices
• Promote the value of solid testing practices to all delivery stakeholders and influence adoption of best practice

Requirements:

• Experience of using Automation Frameworks with technologies such as WebdriverIO, Node.js, JavaScript, Docker and orchestration via automated pipelines. Relevant Skill Level: Practitioner
• Writing and running automated test scripts with Javascript based on agreed standards. Relevant Skill Level: Practitioner
• API testing experience using Postman. Relevant skill level: Practitioner
• Experience with cloud platforms, preferably Microsoft Azure. Knowledge of running pipelines and reviewing logs. Relevant Skill Level: Practitioner
• Experience with integrating testing as part of a Secure-SDLC using CI/CD tooling in an DevSecOps environment eg GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD. Relevant skill level: Practitioner.
• Demonstrate past experience with implementing testing approaches, derived from a test strategy and a Software/Data Test Life Cycle, pertinent to data migration and re-engineering. Relevant skill level: Practitioner
• Experience with testing citizen facing services developed using programming languages and frameworks comprising of Back End/Front End service architecture. Relevant skill level: Practitioner.
• Experience with testing highly scalable, distributed, cloud native (PaaS/FaaS) and microservice orientated architecture applications leveraging containerisation, container orchestration, service mesh, messaging, proxies, APIs, persistent and ephemeral storage etc. Relevant skill level: Practitioner.
• Experience of writing and running stress/load testing using K6 or similar tools. Relevant skill level: Working
• Experience with data storage solutions such as Redis. Relevant skill level: Working
• Experience with analytics and interactive visualization tools such as Grafana or Kibana. Relevant skill level: Working
• Experience with testing an IDAM (Identity and Access Management) solution. Relevant skill level: Working
• Experience with devising TDD/BDD or Acceptance Test Driven Development strategies using a range of tools/frameworks, ensuring test coverage and execution is in line with the project, programme or portfolio Test Strategy and Business Risk Objectives. Relevant skill level: Working.
• Awareness of Application Lifecycle Management and IT Service Management using tools such as Splunk and ServiceNow. Relevant skill level: Aware.

This role will require you to have or be willing to go through Security Clearance. As part of the onboarding process candidates will be asked to complete a Baseline Personnel Security Standard; details of the evidence required to apply may be found on the government website Gov.UK. If you are unable to meet this and any associated criteria, then your employment may be delayed, or rejected . Details of this will be discussed with you at interview.