Test Manager with Duck Creek / Guidewire Upgrade in City of London

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.
• Lead Playwright adoption and implementation for modern web UI automation, including best practices for resilience, parallel execution, cross‑browser testing, and integration with pipelines.
• 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).
• Hands‑on experience with Playwright for web UI automation : test authoring, debugging, parallel execution, cross‑browser testing, test flakiness mitigation strategies, and CI integration.
• 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.

Leadership & Programme Experience

• 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.