IT Quality Assurance Analyst

📋 Description

• • Own the end-to-end quality assurance lifecycle for National University’s expanding portfolio of web, CRM, and analytics solutions that serve 45,000+ students and 4,500 faculty and staff across the United States.
• • Translate functional and design specifications into comprehensive test strategies, ensuring every feature—from course-registration portals to Salesforce Marketing Cloud journeys—meets rigorous standards for reliability, accessibility, and performance.
• • Design, document, and maintain both manual and automated test cases, harnessing tools such as LambdaTest, QTest, and BrowserStack to validate cross-browser compatibility, responsive layouts, and data integrity across Microsoft SQL back-end systems.
• • Execute backend database testing in a Microsoft SQL environment, validating stored procedures, SQL jobs, and triggers that power real-time dashboards and student-facing applications; create data-driven test harnesses that replicate production-scale scenarios.
• • Build and maintain a traceability matrix that maps every requirement to a corresponding test case, ensuring 100 % coverage and enabling rapid impact analysis when specifications change mid-sprint.
• • Partner daily with developers, business analysts, product owners, and UX designers in agile ceremonies—stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives—to clarify acceptance criteria, refine user stories, and embed quality gates into the Definition of Done.
• • Facilitate formal test-plan and test-case reviews, presenting risk-based coverage strategies to cross-functional stakeholders and securing sign-off before code reaches higher environments.
• • Isolate, replicate, and document defects with surgical precision—capturing screenshots, console logs, and SQL snapshots—then verify fixes through rigorous regression and integration testing cycles.
• • Drive continuous improvement of the QA practice by introducing new automation frameworks, performance benchmarks, and exploratory testing techniques that reduce cycle time without sacrificing quality.
• • Configure and manage test environments, seeding representative datasets and ensuring version-controlled test scripts align with branching strategies in Git or Azure DevOps.
• • Champion accessibility and Section 508 compliance, executing screen-reader, keyboard-navigation, and color-contrast tests so every learner—regardless of ability—can engage seamlessly with National University’s digital ecosystem.
• • Monitor production health post-release, analyzing telemetry and student feedback to identify latent defects, then feed insights back into future test planning for iterative enhancement.
• • Uphold strict data-privacy standards (FERPA, GDPR) while handling sensitive student records, ensuring test data masking and anonymization protocols are consistently applied.
• • Mentor junior QA colleagues through code reviews, pair-testing sessions, and lunch-and-learns on topics such as SQL optimization, API contract testing, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud validation techniques.
• • Contribute to the university’s strategic roadmap by providing QA estimates, risk assessments, and go/no-go recommendations that influence release schedules and investment decisions.
• • Foster a culture of transparency and accountability by publishing daily test-execution dashboards, defect-trend analytics, and sprint-quality scorecards that keep leadership and peers aligned on progress and blockers.
• • Embrace a remote-first mindset, leveraging Zoom, Slack, and Miro to maintain high-bandwidth collaboration across time zones while modeling asynchronous communication best practices.
• • Stay ahead of industry trends—evaluating emerging tools such as Playwright, Cypress, or Salesforce-specific test accelerators—and present findings that could elevate National University’s QA maturity to the next level.