Role Title: Test Planning Lead — Mainframe Product Migration Programme

Duration: 6 month initial contract
Location: Remote
Rate: up to £620.08 p/d Umbrella inside IR35

Role purpose / summary

Own and drive the end-to-end test planning for a mainframe product migration programme, ensuring a robust, risk-based, and audit-ready test approach across all test phases and stakeholders (delivery teams, vendors, operations, and business).

Key responsibilities

• Define and maintain the overall test strategy and master test plan (phases, entry/exit criteria, environments, data, tooling, defect management, reporting).
• Build and manage an integrated test schedule aligned to programme milestones, cutover, and release plans.
• Lead risk-based test planning (scope, prioritisation, coverage, non-functional testing) with clear traceability to requirements and migration risks.
• Coordinate test phases: SIT, System/Integration, Regression, UAT support, Performance/Volume, Resilience/DR, Security (as applicable), Dress rehearsals / cutover testing.
• Define and govern test data approach (masked production-like data, synthetic data, data refresh cycles, reconciliation needs).
• Plan and coordinate environment readiness (mainframe regions/LPARs, middleware, interfaces, batch windows, stubs/simulators).
• Establish defect triage cadence, severity model, and quality gates; ensure timely resolution and retest.
• Produce clear test reporting (progress, coverage, defects, risks/issues, go/no-go recommendations).
• Drive stakeholder alignment across dev, infrastructure, ops, business SMEs, and third parties; chair test planning and readiness forums.
• Ensure evidence and controls are in place for audit/compliance (test artefacts, approvals, sign-offs).
• Support migration assurance: parallel runs (if used), reconciliation testing, batch/control totals, and post-migration verification.