Test Manager with Duck Creek / Guidewire Upgrade

Test Manager with Duck Creek / Guidewire Upgrade at N Consulting Ltd

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.
• 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).
• 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.
• 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.