Ascension is seeking a senior-level Quality Assurance Consultant who can establish and lead a disciplined quality-management and testing approach for complex enterprise technology initiatives.

The Senior QA Consultant will go beyond executing tests. This individual will define quality standards, establish metrics, develop testing methodologies, conduct root-cause analysis, support Independent Verification and Validation, and provide an objective assessment of whether applications, integrations, infrastructure components, or technology-enabled processes are ready for implementation.

The ideal candidate will combine hands-on testing knowledge with the judgment needed to identify systemic quality risks, challenge unsupported readiness claims, and recommend corrective action. The consultant should be capable of communicating with developers, business owners, project managers, technical leads, vendors, executives, and nontechnical users.

The RFP requires a bachelor’s degree and eight years of QA experience, including five years applying statistical methods. Senior QA responsibilities include QA metrics, root-cause analysis, IV&V, and quality-methodology development.

Summary of the Contractor Role

The Senior Quality Assurance Consultant will establish a repeatable quality framework across one or more MCPS projects. This may include quality planning, requirements reviews, test governance, risk-based testing, statistical analysis, defect-trend analysis, quality audits, accessibility reviews, performance testing, and release-readiness assessments.

The individual should be self-directed, appropriately skeptical, and comfortable working in environments where requirements, system dependencies, or acceptance criteria may initially be incomplete. The consultant must be able to distinguish isolated defects from broader process failures and determine whether a proposed solution addresses the underlying cause.

The Senior QA Consultant may serve as a task leader and provide technical direction to testers, developers, analysts, and business representatives.

Anticipated Day-to-Day Activities

• Establish project-level QA strategies, quality-management plans, standards, procedures, templates, metrics, and acceptance criteria.
• Lead the development and execution of master test plans covering functional, integration, regression, performance, security, accessibility, and user-acceptance testing.
• Design risk-based testing approaches that concentrate resources on mission-critical, high-impact, and high-likelihood failure areas.
• Conduct independent reviews of requirements, designs, configurations, interfaces, source-code documentation, test evidence, and implementation plans.
• Perform Independent Verification and Validation assessments of system functionality, security, performance, accessibility, and implementation readiness.
• Develop QA scorecards, defect metrics, trend analyses, control charts, sampling methods, and other statistical measures.
• Analyze defect patterns, escaped defects, recurring failures, and process breakdowns.
• Facilitate root-cause analysis sessions and document corrective and preventive actions.
• Evaluate whether corrective actions address root causes and reduce the likelihood of recurrence.
• Define entry criteria, exit criteria, defect-severity standards, acceptance thresholds, and release-readiness measures.
• Review vendor-generated test plans and results for completeness, independence, repeatability, and sufficiency.
• Assess testing coverage against business requirements, technical specifications, privacy obligations, security controls, and accessibility standards.
• Coordinate performance, load, stress, resilience, and disaster-recovery testing.
• Lead defect-triage meetings and advise stakeholders on defect severity, business impact, remediation priority, and release risk.
• Report quality status, unresolved risks, exceptions, trends, and recommendations to project and executive leadership.
• Mentor junior testers and provide technical direction on testing methods, documentation, automation, and quality controls.
• Support process-improvement and lessons-learned activities across the SDLC.
• Maintain objective evidence supporting system acceptance, deployment decisions, audits, and post-implementation reviews.
• Ensure testing and quality-management activities align with applicable MCPS, State of Maryland, privacy, security, and accessibility requirements.
• Prepare weekly productivity and performance reports required under the contract.