Gary Vickers Email & Phone Number

Crawley, England, United Kingdom

• Owning all testing activities for a specific project working in an iterative development cycle, with involvement from the project kick-off meeting through to live delivery• Responsibilities include writing a test strategy and test plan where applicable, depending on the project size• Conducting test plan meetings with the in-house Project Manager, Business Analyst, stakeholders, and the third-party Developers and QA testers• Writing functional and regression test cases for each deployment phase of the software development lifecycle according to the business requirements and acceptance criteria• Writing efficient test cases covering smoke testing on the Development branch, UAT in the delivered project branch, Project Brush Testing on the merged release branch, Business System Regression Testing, Pre-live and Dormant environment testing, ending the Increment with post go-live tests• Maintaining good relationships with internal stakeholders to communicate issues, prioritise bug fixes and manage expectations for the incremental delivery of the project• Raising bugs using Jira, including full details of the issue, impact and priority, with steps to recreate the issue and the expected outcome• Hosting a project walk through session to business stakeholders and relevant system users to demonstrate the project functionality• Producing a project handover document for the live support team• Expanding my testing experience by testing an API using SoapUI

Brighton, United Kingdom

• The focus of the role was to improve the quality of the software releases. I created and documented manual test scripts to be run on the Staging environment to ensure coverage of all critical areas of the business, to be able to give an informed decision on the release based on the results of these tests.• I added an additional quality gate into the QA process by creating high level smoke tests to be run on the final merged development environment, to ensure the release candidate is in a satisfactory state to be deployed to Staging for business testing to commence.• Worked in an Agile sprint cycle with daily stand ups and a live release every 2 weeks.• Mentored a Junior tester who was starting their career in software testing.

Crawley, England, United Kingdom

• Achieved ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level in January 2014• Experience working in both Agile and Waterfall software delivery methodology• At times, worked in an extremely fast paced Agile environment when we delivered multiple releases into live each week• When time did not permit the writing of test cases I used a timeboxed exploratory testing approach to prioritise testing of the areas of highest importance • Over the final 6 months I was responsible for organising the third-party QA teams in Russia and Hungary to ensure we meet testing quality standards and deadlines• Provided training and streamlining processes for the offshore teams to maximise efficiency• Responsible for the deployments of development builds to the QA and Staging environments and I maintained the test data in each of these environments• Produced communications to the business for planned live deployments and hotfixes, and provided release notes containing new features and bug fixes, and a report on the testing performed on each pre-live environment• Worked closely with the Automation testers both in-house and offshore to ensure they are kept up to date with the priorities for writing Automation tests. This was to ensure Automation coverage for new features, or to provide coverage for a scenario where a defect was previously found• Wrote manual test cases against development specifications and executed those test cases manually within the given window in the Agile fortnightly sprint cycle• Raised defects and provided the developers with clear information and steps to recreate• Tested a responsive website on desktop, tablet and mobile devices covering multiple browsers and breakpoints• Gained experience of the Atlassian suite of products including Jira, Bamboo and Confluence, with knowledge of the Zephyr plug-in for storing, and tracing execution of manual test cases.

• Provided system knowledge to users and advised of a work around where possible until the issue is resolved• Recreated user issues and raised defects with the Development team where necessary• Tested bug fixes• Provided developers with detailed information and steps to recreate the issue• Increased my knowledge of IT systems when the system support team merged with the IT helpdesk, becoming the first point of contact for both software and hardware issues

• Involved with setting up and testing of the Aviation side of the business for our European offices, setting up carriers, suppliers and third party providers within the bespoke system, and testing XML requests and responses to verify the correct results were returned where expected.• Dealing with enquiries from European country managers regarding the addition of carriers or routes for their market, the mapping of these airlines into the system and setting up data to include new airports and routes.• This role gave me an introduction to low cost carriers, having previously only being involved with scheduled airlines at Virgin Holidays.

Crawley

• Providing the call centre staff with availability, prices and timings of connecting flights worldwide, to offer destinations not served directly by the Virgin Atlantic flying program, and for domestic connections from regional airports to the major UK international airports used by Virgin Atlantic.• Knowledge of ticketing processes using Virgin Atlantic Shares system and Galileo.• In November 2004 I was selected to travel to India to provide training for a new outsourced department, and again in November 2005 to upskill original team members and to provide training for new starters.

Crawley, England, United Kingdom

Answering incoming calls to provide a personal booking service, information and advice for customers looking for their family holiday, dream trip or Honeymoon to worldwide destinations.This was a very enjoyable role within a great company that fuelled my ambition of travelling the world.