Quality Analyst

Technology is reinventing higher education and at OCAS we play a vital role in helping shape this evolving landscape. We deliver dependable technology systems and business services to support our industry partners and create new pathways for learners exploring and applying to Ontario’s public colleges . Recently named a Waterloo Area Top Employer for the ninth consecutive year, we’re looking for innovators who can bring their expertise and passion to our growing team.

This position is offered as a 6-month contract. Depending on organizational needs and project developments, there is potential for the contract to be extended.
Do you enjoy analytics, visualizations, and databases? Do you challenge software beyond its acceptance criteria to discover deep system problems? Combine these two passions! We’re looking for an enthusiastic, customer-focused and technology-minded Quality Analyst to imitate our users and challenge our applications by exposing the ways they fail.
As a Quality Analyst at OCAS, you’ll play an important role in developing and supporting the technology that helps hundreds of thousands of individuals every year as they take the first step toward a brighter future through college. With experience in the data and reporting space, you’ll be an integral member of our Quality team, imagining and brainstorming your own test plans.
As an advocate for quality, you’ll work within a scrum team and test features deployed to the test environment. You’ll be challenged to imagine ways that both related and seemingly unrelated features or products might interact with each other to expose real-world problems faced by our users. A self-starter, you’ll also influence the direction of our team and our products.
You share the OCAS Quality team’s core values:

• We can test anything put in front of us whether or not we have requirements for it: a prototype, a design, a flowchart, an idea, or even actual software
• All software systems inherently have bugs and problems to be found
• A passing test suite is very worrisome; it means we haven’t worked hard enough to find bugs yet
• Automated check systems are only a piece of a successful test plan

In this role, you will:

• Test Power BI reports – including data quality, data security and user access, and SQL jobs, database, and ETL design – for our Data Warehouse
• Validate data quality throughout the project lifecycle: from data source/origin, through ETL, and visual reporting
• Work closely with team members, including testers, developers, product managers, client service representatives, and others, to build and execute exploratory test plans that rigorously test our data products’ functionality and expose potential failures
• Raise awareness about issues discovered during testing and work collaboratively with members of other departments to develop solutions

You should have:

• A technical college or university credential in Computer Science, Data Science, Information Technology, or another similar discipline
• 3-5 years’ experience in the software testing field, over which time you have demonstrated continuous learning and personal growth in this profession
• Experience with the analysis and evaluation of data reports
• Familiarity with relational databases and using SQL to validate data in the reports
• Understanding of visualization software such as Power BI or Cognos
• A curious mind that asks lots of questions and enjoys researching multiple perspectives before determining the best solution
• Knowledge of AODA and WCAG guidelines
• A desire to ensure all persons have an equal opportunity to use the product being released

Other desirable experience:

• Familiarity with various components of web applications such as integrations, performance, security, and reliability
• Various testing strategies and methodologies, especially session-based exploratory testing
• Experience creating mind maps or using other brainstorming tools and methods
• Software delivery and test methodologies, including Scrum
• Test scripting experience in Selenium WebDriver, Protractor, Appium, or other similar frameworks
• Any of C#, Java, or JavaScript
• Familiarity with Microsoft Azure DevOps / VSTS / VSO / TFS, JIRA, or another similar SDLC tool

Salary per hour: $40.00 - $46.00
Position Reports to: Team Lead, Data Solutions

OCAS is committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We welcome and encourage applications from diverse candidates, including people with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process. While we thank all respondents for their interest, only those candidates being invited to interview for this position will be contacted.