Test Manager

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 work streams 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 reusable 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 Dev Ops, Git Hub 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, Load Runner 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…