Senior Quality Analyst

Responsible To: Chief Product & Technology Officer

Location and hours of work:

At Elite Dynamics we champion our clients to utilise the power of tech to improve productivity and performance, and it’s the same for our people. We offer a remote working policy for all employees, albeit some international travel will be required for training, events and periodically scheduled company meetings.

This role is a full-time home-based role, with typical working hours expected between 9am and 5.30pm, although we do like to finish a little earlier on Fridays. Additional hours may be required to meet deadlines, which could include evenings and weekends.

About this Senior Quality Analyst role

We’re looking for a senior quality analyst who sees quality as something you build in, not bolt on. You’ll be the hands-on testing authority across our custom Park (EliteParks) and Marina (EliteMarinas) management platforms built in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 estate, spanning Business Central, Customer Engagement (CRM), and Power Platform.

You help drive the quality of our standard and custom solutions and act as a quality coach to the wider delivery team. A defining part of this role is working upstream: partnering with product manager, consultants, and developers to ensure every piece of work enters development with clear, testable acceptance criteria and exits with the appropriate quality level embedded.

This is a player-coach role. You’ll spend real time testing (exploratory, functional, regression, integration) and equal energy raising the quality bar of everyone around you.

Key Responsibilities of the Senior Quality Analyst

Hands on testing:

• Design and execute functional, exploratory, regression, and integration testing across our standard solutions, including customisations and extensions to them in Dynamics 365 Business Central & CE, and our web applications and APIs.
• Test end-to-end business processes that span CE and BC, including integrations via Dataverse, Power Automate, and custom APIs & webapps.
• Validate data migrations, environment refreshes, and release upgrades (including Microsoft’s twice-yearly release waves), assessing impact on customisations and extensions.
• Build and maintain regression suites that give the team genuine confidence to release, prioritising coverage by business risk rather than volume.
• Contribute to test automation where it adds value. For example, experience of AL Test Toolkit for BC, Playwright or EasyRepro for CE and be honest about where manual and exploratory testing remain the right tools.
• Raise clear, well-evidenced defects with reproduction steps, environment detail, and business impact, and see them through to resolution.

Acceptance Criteria & Shift-Left Quality:

• Facilitate refinement sessions (e.g. three amigos) to ensure every user story has unambiguous, testable acceptance criteria before development starts.
• Coach product owners and consultants in writing acceptance criteria, including Given/When/Then where useful, and challenge vague or untestable requirements constructively.
• Help define and uphold a practical Definition of Ready and Definition of Done, and make sure the team actually lives by them.
• Identify edge cases, negative paths, data scenarios, and non-functional considerations early, when they’re cheap to address.

Quality Coaching:

• Act as the team’s quality conscience: embed a whole-team ownership of quality rather than a “QA gate” mentality.
• Pair with developers on testability, unit test coverage, and test design; pair with consultants on scenario design grounded in real customer workflows.
• Introduce and iterate lightweight quality practices using risk-based test planning, bug triage discipline, release readiness reviews, proportionate to the team’s size and maturity.
• Report meaningfully on quality: trends, escaped defects, release confidence giving us insight, not vanity metrics.

Release & Environment Management:

• Contribute to release planning, go/no-go decisions, and post-release verification.
• Manage test data and test environments across sandboxes, working with DevOps pipelines (Azure DevOps or GitHub) for build validation and deployment testing.
• Facilitate appropriate product documentation and release notes

Essential skills

• Significant hands-on QA experience within the Microsoft Dynamics 365 ecosystem, with working knowledge of Business Central (extensions, AL customisations, core financial and operational processes), Customer Engagement (Sales/Service, Dataverse, model-driven apps) and Power Platform (Power Automate flows, Power Apps, Power BI outputs).
• Demonstrable track record of testing customised and extended Dynamics solutions, not just vanilla implementations.
• Strong exploratory testing skills and structured test design (risk-based, boundary, scenario-based).
• Experience facilitating requirements refinement and defining acceptance criteria with product and business stakeholders.
• Experience of quality coaching and/or leading pragmatic quality practice improvement within an agile delivery team.
• Working knowledge of Azure DevOps (or equivalent) for backlog, test case management, and pipelines.
• Excellent written and verbal communication with an ability to translate between business language and technical detail and engage in constructive challenge when needed.
• Willingness to lead the way in adopting AI tooling and practices to drive quality standards where appropriate.

Desirable skills

• Test automation experience relevant to the stack: AL Test Toolkit, Playwright, EasyRepro, Postman/API testing.
• Exposure to ISV product development on Dynamics (AppSource compliance, multi-tenant considerations, AL-Go for GitHub).
• Experience with data migration testing and integration testing across third-party systems.
• ISTQB or equivalent certification (valued but demonstrated craft matters more).

What Good Looks Like In 12 Months

• Stories consistently enter development with testable acceptance criteria; rework from ambiguous requirements has measurably reduced.
• A risk-prioritised regression capability exists for both CE and BC, and release confidence is high and evidenced.
• Escaped defect rates are trending down, and the team, not just QA, owns quality outcomes.
• Microsoft release wave upgrades are absorbed predictably, with impact assessed and tested ahead of enforcement.

Behaviours We Value:

• Constructively challenging: comfortable asking “how will we know this works?” in any forum.
• Pragmatic: right-sizes process to the problem; automates where it pays, tests manually where it doesn’t.
• Collaborative: builds quality through influence and coaching, not gatekeeping.
• Curious about the business domain: tests from the user’s seat, not just the specification.