Career
Software Tester
A Software Tester proves quality with risk-based testing and clear evidence. You help the team find what matters before users do, automate where it pays off, and keep the Definition of Done honest about accessibility, security and regression. You are not a human gate at the end of the pipeline, and you are not the only person responsible for quality.
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What this job is responsible for
- Risk-based test strategy and explicit coverage trade-offs
- A balance of exploratory and scripted testing that matches the risk
- Challenging acceptance criteria early and partnering on BDD examples
- Clear defects: how to reproduce, impact and residual risk
- Automation where faster feedback is worth the maintenance cost
- Release evidence, including WCAG checks on public interfaces
Signs things are going well
- Critical paths get fast feedback before release, not only in UAT week
- Bugs include impact and risk, not only reproduction steps
- Test ideas appear in refinement, not only after coding
- Flaky suites are treated as defects in the pipeline, not background noise
- RAG on quality risk is trusted by the Delivery Manager and Product Owner
- Defects that escape to live feed a learning loop into strategy
How this role works with nearby roles
- Business Analyst: Shapes requirements. You challenge whether they are testable and turn criteria into proof.
- DevOps / SRE: Owns the pipeline and production signals. You partner on test stages, environments and observability for quality.
- Product Owner: Owns release value trade-offs. You make remaining risk visible for go / no-go decisions.
- Delivery Manager: Looks after pace and team health. You keep quality risk honest in RAG so speed is not theatre.
Who this guide is for
Testers, QA engineers and SDETs in agile teams delivering digital services in the UK, including Civil Service contexts, who want a plain guide to risk-based quality and release evidence.