Infrastructure, OAT, ORT, and Non-Functional Testin

Key Responsibilities

• Test Leadership & Planning
• Lead the test strategy, test planning, and test execution for Infrastructure, OAT, ORT, and Non-Functional Testing.
• Define test scope, entry/exit criteria, traceability, and risk mitigation plans
• Collaborate with Infra, DevOps, Cloud, Security, and Operations teams to align test objectives
• Facilitate test readiness reviews, test cycles, and go/no-go decisions.
• Management of the test cycle, including defect reporting, with Jira
• Infrastructure & OAT Execution
• Perform and oversee testing for:
• Server builds (Windows/Linux/Unix)
• Virtualization platforms (VMware, Nutanix and Hyper-V)
• Network components (LAN/WAN/Firewalls/VPN)
• Storage, backup, and recovery systems
• Cloud infrastructure (Azure/AWS/GCP)
• Patching, configuration, and hardening validation
• High availability and failover testing
• Monitoring, logging, and alert systems (Splunk, Dynatrace, etc.)
• Validate operational aspects: Maintainability
• Scalability
• Supportability
• Logging & monitoring
• Runbook readiness
• Access & security controls
• Operations Acceptance Testing (OAT)
• Validate operational processes and ensure production-readiness, including:
• Backup and restore procedures
• User access & identity management
• Batch jobs and scheduled tasks
• Incident, problem & change management alignment
• DR/BCP testing and results validation
• Ensure all runbooks, SOPs, and support documentation are complete and accurate
• Stakeholder Management
• Good communications skills are critical
• Act as the key point of contact between testing teams, project managers, architects, and operations
• Provide clear daily/weekly test status reports, defect metrics, risk registers, and dashboards
• Manage test resources (internal/third-party), test environments and dependencies
• Quality & Continuous Improvement
• Drive best practices in test automation for infrastructure (where applicable)
• Introduce improvements to testing processes, tooling, and documentation
• Ensure compliance with ITIL, ISO, NIS or other appropriate regulatory requirements
• Conduct post-implementation reviews and lessons learned sessions.

Here is some background that may be useful when you vet candidates:

Testing is split between software and infrastructure. Any artifact that is not an application is considered infrastructure. Software base projects need an infrastructure test engagement.

The common infrastructure element is the network and SDDC.

Network SME/Testers have a good appreciation of what is connected to the network and make good infrastructure team members.

The current technology is scope at SWS is: A SDDC based of VMWare (of being migrated to) VMWare VCF including NSX. This is an on prem cloud and will eventually be migrated (where possible) to the cloud (Azure). VCF is almost infrastructure as a service.

The systems run on a high-performance network - the IDCC is 20Gbps.

There is a lot of data base and application migration work being carried out or scheduled.

The main data base systems are Oracle; the main application is SAP - with a significant number of non-SAP systems.

There are business applications and many OT systems - as to be expected at a water company.

There are the associated systems that are expected to be implemented in an enterprise network

Infrastructure testing will cover:

Unit and unit integration testing

Systems integration testing with applications

All aspects of operational acceptance testing including:

Resilience and reliability testing (component and system failover etc.)

Monitoring and alerting

Recovery and reliability (backup and restore)

Security Testing

Infrastructure test team members will be required develop test plans, test scripts and associated test artifacts as well as supervise their execution and carry out reporting. Good communications skills are essential.

The infrastructure test team works closely with the implementation teams and is expected to be able to work in a test driven design environment.

The infrastructure test team must be the trusted advisors of the software and systems testers.

We need proactive systems testers who can adapt to a changing high-performance environment.

The assimilation of new technology will be required - testers must be prepared to deal with new technology.