Software Defects Manager - #1661554

Are you ready to take a leading role in driving defect management as we transition to a DevOps approach? Join NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) and support both agile and traditional waterfall processes to ensure quality delivery into production. At NHSBT, we save and improve lives by delivering a safe, reliable supply of blood, organs, and tissues. This is more than a job, it's your chance to make a life-saving impact. You'll support a major 6.5-year programme (started in 2021) to modernise our critical blood supply system, transitioning from Delphi to C#. This system is essential to donor, patient, and colleague safety and underpins key services from managing donor records and appointments to blood manufacturing, testing, stock control, and order fulfilment. There's significant scope to bring your expertise and help develop and mature our defect management capability. You'll play a key part in ensuring we deliver safe, high-quality software that supports critical national health operations. If you thrive in a fast-paced, collaborative environment and are passionate about safeguarding people, assets, and our reputation, we'd love to hear from you. Your leadership, technical know-how, and people skills will be valued in a close-knit team where your success is ours.

In this new role, you will take the lead in developing and maturing the Defect Management process within the Blood Technology Product Centre. You will bring a strong understanding of defect management, software testing, and the software development lifecycle. Your responsibilities will include:

1. Having excellent leadership, negotiation, and communications skills to liaise with software development teams, users and support services, ultimately being responsible for bringing defects to a close, with your inputs being used to gauge the quality of software under test.


2. Working closely with the Head of Product Centre Testing, internal and external stakeholders, and Quality Assurance Managers, maintaining strong working relationships with each to design, develop, implement and improve processes and policies for the management of defects.


3. Ensure the agreed defect management process is correctly followed in a timely nature by all stakeholders.


4. Provide regular defect metrics to inform the test function and provide input into regular Programme updates.


5. Run defect triage meetings with all stakeholders to ensure defects are correctly raised and categorised.


6. Run regular update meetings to ensure that defects are being effectively addressed to closure.


7. Provide a single point of contact for management of defect queries.

You will need to travel and stay away from base on occasion (approx. once per month), which may involve irregular hours and overnight stays with prior notice.

It takes all types of people to deliver the kind of service that saves and improves lives. At NHS Blood and Transplant, you'll join a team of more than 6,000 people who are making a genuine difference to communities, families, friends, relatives and more across the UK. We play a unique and special role in the NHS by helping people do something extraordinary - donate blood, blood products, organs, tissues, or stem cells to save someone in need. Our three core values are what set us apart. They guide and inspire everything we do. By being caring, expertly meeting the needs of our patients and our people, and accepting nothing less than the best quality, we can do extraordinary work and help our people to do something extraordinary in their career, too. Three small words, one big difference - Caring, Expert and Quality. Together we'll save and improve more lives than ever. You will join us on our journey to create an inclusive workplace and aim to reflect the diverse communities we work with, and we positively encourage applications from all sectors of the community.

Please view the attached recruitment profile which is a summary of the detailed Job Description and Person Specification.

• Degree or significant industrial experience in Software testing and defect management


• Highly developed specialist knowledge, underpinned by theory and experience. In-depth knowledge of software systems and testing procedures acquired through a combination of specialist training and relevant study to masters degree or equivalent level.


• Extensive training in application testing tools and methodologies.


• Demonstrates commitment to own continued professional development (CPD)

• Substantial experience of software development and testing methodologies in mixed technology environments.


• Substantial knowledge of testing and quality standards and protocols


• Past defect management experience testing experience to lead/manager level and specific defect management experience


• Knowledge and experience of defect management and application testing with different software development methodologies, including Waterfall and Agile Iterative models


• Knowledge and experience of change management


• Knowledge of general IT legislation such as Data Protection Act and the Computer Misuse Act


• Extensive knowledge and experience of working with Microsoft Office packages, particularly Visio and Excel