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by Mathias Bogaert.
Original Post: (Guest blog) 10 Top Tips for Test Managers
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This guest blog post is part of an Atlassian blog series raising awareness about testing innovation within the QA community. You can find the other posts in this series under the QA Innovation tag. This post is written by Kieran Williams, QA Manager at Catch who has developed the highly successful QA management tool Enterprise Tester. Kieran has been involved in software testing since 1999. Have you noticed most of the testing information out there is quite often about the theory of testing? This is nice, but sometimes gets a wee bit monotonous and wordy too… If you are reading this you probably have a testing background and you are probably of the practical nature. “Give me something clear and concise” I hear you say! So I will and as an added bonus I will also try not to make it too long or too boring. Here are my 10 tips to create the best chances for success when your team is testing projects in your organisation. I am sure there are many more, so feedback and comments would be great to see! 1. Great Staff There are a lot of great staff out there and typically with testers I find attitude is everything! Sure, you can learn great technical skills but if your team members don’t have the right attitude or intuition for testing you will probably be out of luck. If you are lucky enough to have great Test Leads or Testers you will probably find they have the right attitude and social skills to deal diplomatically with people of all levels in all sorts of roles. JDI is always a good approach! Speaking of tester’s intuition, check out one of the earlier blogs in the series on using your intuition, Testing and Bad Smells: When to Investigate Potential Bugs. Thanks Penny for a great post! 2. Get the Team Involved Following on from getting your A-Team together, you now need to get them involved in every which way you can. Get team members involved in documenting the process, in the decision making for your projects, and encourage actively speaking up when they see problems or issues. Keeping the communication lines open with honest and frank discussion, and group involvement, is always going to be better than a dictatorship! 3. It’s your Process – do what fits you! Waterfall, Agile, Exploratory, Context-Driven… the list goes on. You need to decide – hopefully as a team – which methodology and which practices of that methodology fit your organisation. You may decide that you want to do a little of each methodology or make up your own process. It doesn’t really matter as long as you have your process documented. That way, you can ensure all of the team are on the same page when it comes to projects across your organisation, plus any rogue testers can be directed to the process in order to straighten them out if need be. 4. Risky Business Manage your risk. Easy to say, sometimes hard to do. Especially if you have limited or no requirements. Having the team prioritise which functional areas need to be tested first, [...]
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