Lead - Software Quality Assurance

Role Purpose

Lead the planning, coordination and execution of User Acceptance Testing (UAT) for the CoMP platform, ensuring the solution is validated against approved business requirements & acceptance criteria and is ready for go-live. The UAT Lead serves as the single point of coordination for all UAT activities, with accountability for UAT scheduling, business tester and resource coordination, daily test execution, test progress tracking, defect log administration, defect resolution and retesting coordination across business, SIT/development, migration and project teams. The role is responsible for driving UAT activities to completion within the agreed project timeline, proactively managing risks, issues and blockers, providing clear visibility of UAT and go-live readiness, and securing formal business sign-off as a prerequisite for production deployment.

Key Responsibilities

• Define the UAT strategy, approach, entry/exit criteria and sign-off framework for CoMP, aligned to the approved BRD/HLD and overall project delivery and go-live milestones.
• Develop and maintain the UAT plan, test scenarios and test cases, ensuring full traceability back to business requirements and clearly defined acceptance criteria.
• Coordinate and schedule UAT execution across business users and workstreams, including test-cycle planning, resource allocation, tester availability and dependencies, with particular attention to the year-end / festive testing window.
• Facilitate day-to-day UAT execution, including daily coordination with business testers, SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) and technical teams; monitoring planned versus completed test cases; logging and triaging defects; coordinating retesting; and tracking resolution with SIT / development teams.
• Own and administer the central UAT defect log and end-to-end defect lifecycle, including severity and priority classification, assignment and ownership, escalation of blockers, resolution tracking, retesting and closure against agreed thresholds.
• Track and report UAT progress, test coverage, defect status and overall readiness (% completion), including test cases planned/executed, pass/fail/blocked status, completion percentage, outstanding critical defects and key blockers, to the Project Manager and Steering Committee.
• Coordinate with the Migration Lead to validate migrated data within UAT, ensuring data accuracy, completeness and business acceptance are incorporated into the relevant test scenarios.
• Drive UAT to completion and obtain formal business sign-off as a prerequisite for go-live, ensuring all agreed exit criteria and critical defect thresholds have been met.
• Identify UAT risks and issues and dependencies early and drive mitigation with the Project Manager and business stakeholders with timely escalation of issues that may impact the UAT schedule or go-live readiness.
• Lead daily UAT governance and coordination, including execution status reviews, tester/resource availability, defect triage, blocker resolution, retesting priorities and follow-up of outstanding actions.

Key Skills & Competencies

• Strong test planning, scheduling, coordination, stakeholder management skills and execution management skills.
• Strong resource and stakeholder coordination across business, technical and vendor teams.
• Hands on experience in test execution tracking, defect log administration, triage, retesting and closure.
• Ability to translate business requirements into test scenarios, test cases, coverage and acceptance criteria with clear traceability.
• Strong daily UAT coordination, progress monitoring, risk/issue management and escalation capability.
• Clear and concise UAT status reporting, including test completion, defect status, blockers and go-live readiness
• Structured defect management with clear, concise reporting to senior stakeholders.
• Able to work to tight timelines and coordinate testing through peak / festive periods.
• Strong communication and facilitation across business and technical teams, organisational skills, with the ability to drive UAT through to formal business sign-off.