Description
Digital Beehive is a Leeds-based software company building The Hive - a suite of cloud applications that make working with NEC contracts and projects simpler. Our products include Contract Bee, Project Bee, Payment Bee, Digital Contracts and Document Bee, with more on the roadmap. We are a growing, collaborative team that cares deeply about building high-quality, dependable software for our clients.
As our Application Tester you will own the quality of the Digital Beehive product suite. Embedded within our agile development team, you will spend most of your time designing, building and maintaining automated end-to-end tests with Playwright - while driving up test coverage across the company, growing into unit testing, and championing quality at every stage of the sprint and release lifecycle. You will work side by side with developers throughout each sprint, helping shape and scope work before it starts and verifying it all the way through to live. You will also help keep our live applications healthy by triaging customer support tickets, and work closely with the account management team to capture new feature and change requests cleanly from the outset. Within this role you report to our Senior Developer.
Responsibilities
Automated & end-to-end testing (Playwright)
- Design, build and maintain Playwright end-to-end test suites across our applications - this is where you will spend the majority of your time.
- Keep the automated suite fast, reliable and meaningful; investigate and resolve flaky or failing tests.
- Run automated tests against feature branches and release candidates to catch issues early.
Test plans, cases & coverage
- Author and maintain test plans, suites and test cases in Azure DevOps.
- Take ownership of growing test coverage across the company, with a clear, measurable improvement over time.
- Identify gaps in coverage and prioritise the areas where automated testing adds the most value.
Unit testing
- Grow into writing and extending unit tests alongside the development team.
- Help embed a “tested by default” mindset so quality is built in, not bolted on.
Testing within agile sprints
- Test alongside development throughout the sprint, rather than only at the end.
- Take part in sprint ceremonies - planning, stand-ups, refinement, reviews and retrospectives - and help the team meet its sprint objectives.
- Work closely and openly with developers day to day.
Planning, scope & acceptance criteria
- Take part in planning and refinement sessions and help scope upcoming work.
- Make sure acceptance criteria are captured, clear and testable, and that stories meet the team’s Definition of Ready before they are picked up.
- Challenge ambiguity early so stories are genuinely ready to start, build and test.
Capturing requirements with Account Management
- Work alongside the account management team to capture new feature requests and change requests in full at the point they are raised.
- Make sure every request is recorded with enough detail, context and acceptance criteria up front, so it arrives ready to plan rather than as a thin “Planning Required” item.
- Help reduce the volume of under-scoped work items by getting the right information captured at the point of data entry.
QA in the release pipeline
- Act as a quality gate within the CI/CD release pipeline and during releases.
- Carry out post go-live testing and verification to confirm releases are healthy in production.
Application support & Zendesk triage
- Review and triage incoming Zendesk support tickets, reproducing and verifying customer-reported issues.
- Turn confirmed issues into clear, well-formed bug work items with reliable steps to reproduce.
- Help keep our live applications healthy and customers supported, feeding recurring issues back into test coverage.
Azure DevOps & work items
- Raise and manage bugs, test cases and work items in Azure DevOps with clear, reproducible detail.
- Maintain traceability between requirements, tests and defects.
General
- Continually act with integrity and in line with the best interest of the business. Demonstrating high standards of behaviour including responsibility, accountability and reliability.
- Communicate effectively within the team, seeking guidance when needed and contributing ideas during discussions.
- Actively engage in continual professional development.
- Stay updated on industry trends and emerging technologies.
- Proactively seek opportunities to enhance technical skills and contribute to the team’s knowledge sharing culture.
Personal specification
Essential
- Hands-on experience writing automated tests with Playwright (or a comparable end-to-end framework such as Cypress or Selenium).
- Confident using Azure DevOps - boards, work items and test plans - or an equivalent ALM/test-management tool.
- A solid understanding of agile/Scrum and of testing within sprints alongside developers.
- Comfortable writing and maintaining test-automation code (TypeScript / JavaScript).
- A strong eye for detail, a quality-first mindset, and clear written and verbal communication.
- Able to read acceptance criteria critically and turn them into effective test coverage.
Desirable
- Experience writing unit tests (e.g. xUnit / NUnit for .NET, or Vitest for Angular).
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and release processes (Azure Pipelines).
- Exposure to Angular and/or .NET applications.
- Basic SQL for verifying data.
- A testing qualification such as ISTQB.
- Experience triaging customer issues in a support / ticketing tool such as Zendesk.
- Confident gathering and documenting requirements with account management and non-technical stakeholders, capturing detail accurately at the point of entry.
- Product owner / project-management skills - comfortable helping manage and maintain the backlog and chasing stakeholders for scope and clarity (a strong advantage).
Benefits
- Salary band: £30,000 - £35,000
- Annual Bonus: Based on company and individual performance.
- Holiday: 25 days of holiday, with an additional day added each year, up to a maximum of 30 days, plus bank holidays.
- Pension Scheme: 4% employee contribution, matched with 4% employer contribution.
- Life Assurance: Provided.
- Private Medical Insurance: Provided.
- Hybrid Working: Requirement to work from our Leeds office, at Department within Leeds Docks, at least one day per week.
How to apply
We’re an equal opportunities employer and welcome applications from all suitably qualified candidates.
Please note: due to the nature of some client contracts, any offer of employment is subject to screening (right to work, identity checks, DBS and a 3-year reference check)
Please submit your cv and covering letter to [email protected]
Pay: £30,000.00-£35,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Company pension
- Cycle to work scheme
- Life insurance
- On-site parking
- Private medical insurance
- Sick pay
- Work from home
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Leeds LS10 1PZ
