Introduction

You have found your dream job as a Test Manager or you are wanting to become a Test Manager. How do you prepare for the start into this new venture? How do you get to be a very successful Test Manager?

The "Test Manager Startup" is there to help you! There are six key areas that will pave the way to success namely Leadership, Vision, Manage & Organise, People, Process and Tools & Technology.

They key is to put a strategy together that encompasses all of these areas BEFORE you enter into a new venture and once you are in the thick of it CONTINOUSLY elaborate and develop these areas.

Leadership

As you clearly cannot understand and asses every single technical (domain knowledge & organisational knowledge), you need to set out some principles. Helping you define these properly is some background knowledge of "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People". Those accountable for a process may not necessarily have the highest competency level. Whilst they may, in the past, have operated at a higher level of competency - and will draw on this experience - as a leader, their role has moved beyond "doing" to a "leadership" such as setting the culture and environment for the activity to be done correctly. Of course, if a role involves both accountability and responsibility, a higher level of competency will normally be required.

Moving away from the small problem management also means that there is more emphasis your leadership qualities. Great inspirations are Steven Covey's "The 8th Habit", Simon Sinek and David Marquet: Turn The Ship Around!.

Leadership also means to concentrate on breakthrough improvements to better the overall performance of the team. For you to be able to drive the improvement, at minimum you need to be familiar with PDCA, better if you have done some training and certification in Project & Service Management. Improvement Initiatives need to be run as projects, a great tool is "The One-Page Project Manager", and a great bedtime reading Tom DeMarco's "The Deadline"

So before you start on your new endevour, develop a plan. More specificically a 30-60-90 day plan. Many organisations require you to do this as part of the interview process. So in any case it is worth preparing for it. The key is to align it to the objectives of the company (your future boss), list key tasks and deliverables with dates into three "buckets" that are clearly themed, i.e. 30-Understand, 60-Assess, 90-Plan. One of the outcomes needs to be a vision statement.

Vision

Your Stakeholders need to broadly understand what you are trying to achieve, without getting lost in the detail. A vision statement is the ideal platform to do so. It should also relate to the priciples you are setting out in your leadership approach. Both should be supplementing each other and not contradict.

It is also important to match this vision to the overall vision or mission of the organisation you are working for and how this organisation is structured.

An example would be the "Quality @ Speed" paradigm that is currently trending within (Software) Testing. Forrester research has identified four key enablers for implementing a "Quality @ Speed" organisation in order of priority:

Federated Software Test Organisation
Integrated Management Systems
Automated Infrastructure
Test Automation

A prerequisite to "Quality @ Speed" is the close collaboration between Product Management (Requirements), Engineering (Design & Implementation) and Testing (How well does the Design & Implementation meet the Requirements?).

What do these key enablers mean? How do you define them? To avoid having to rewrite definitions on a daily basis, building a roadmap is a good strategy. This roadmap needs to be specifc to your organisation. Use the following as an example, but keep your company's organisation and culture in mind.

Going from left to right is starting from the basics to raising the bar and achieving nirvana. The roadmap items on the right should be very difficult (but not impossible) to achieve. You can communicate and measure your progress easily against such a roadmap. You can also answer important questions like priorities or where investments are to be made easily.

Having a federated software test organisation basically means that test professionals are embedded in Development and Engineering teams. The measures for how far you got with a federated software test organising are:

How close to the start of a project is test part of the core team? and
How testing contibutes value to the team?

The value of a test-management system can only be realised fully when all testing from all areas - hardware - software - mechanical - and from all Test Levels (Unit, Component, System, System Integration, User Acceptance, Operational Acceptance, Technical Test etc.) is reported in one tool across the organisation.

Combined with other systems like requirements and task management systems like Jira, it enables metrics reporting and helps identify problems early on.

The most important asset for testing are test environments

Without test environments, there is no testing.
The faster test environments can be provisioned with desired configurations and quantities - the more time is available for testing and more confidence in the results.
Test environments also includes sofwtrae and services to manage and monitor the environment and automated testing.

Test automation is more than just execution – test automation covers the generation and execution of tests and the analysis of test results - good or bad.

Manage & Organise

So how do you organise your self from day 1. What should your operational top priorities be? The video "The 5 Main Steps Of The Lean Manager" is an excellent guide for defining your top priorities. I have put together a summary of the key points from this video and related it to my interpretation of the role of a Test Manager.

Control Your Territory (Step 1)

Know the limits of your working area and identify the resources available.

In a knowledge worker organisation your working area will be defined more by your responsibilities, the relationship to your superiors, peers and direct reports than by physical boundaries. However, most people will work at some point in an office environment, so it is important to figure out where meeting rooms and breakout areas are and how to book then and also get some catering in. Without Test Environments you cannot test, so you need to know how your test environments are created, managed and retired. Any issues or black holes here should be your top priorities.

Organize Work Area

Don't forget that eventually you will have to scan or print something so you need to figure out straight away how to do this or who can help you. You will also need to understand to what extend you can "decorate" your surroundings with whiteboards, flipcharts and dashboard monitors. Not only does this depend on the sensitivity of the information displayed and the frequency and type of visitor your area will host (from investors to interview candidates).

Regular Field Visits

Especially when your team is distributed in different physical locations, make sure you pay regular visits and have "chats over a coffee" to get to understand the realities on the ground. When you have "remote" team member, especially when mixed with team members in teh same office location, make sure that they are involved as much as possible. This should not be an issue given modern low cost phone, chat and video conferencing facilities.

Align Team to Company Goals

Understand your team (if it exists) and make an assessment of the skills and compencies and characters. It is very important to understand individuals (i.e. Regular 1:1) as well as team dynamics to get to built a high performing team. Make sure that your team has the right skills to achieve the companies objectives. If not, its time for change.

Give Meaning to Actions (Step 2)

Identify Stakeholders and their Expectations

For the Test Manager this most importantly means to clearly understand the expectations from superiors, peers and direct reports . You also need to be able to communicate what testing is and its value proposition and what the difference between testing and quality assurance is and how the relate to each other.

Define Performance Indicators and Adapt or create Processes to meet these KPIs

There are a number of "standard" metrics related to test. Whatever your metrics and Key Performance Indicators are, make sure that you can easily measure and report them, ideally through automated dashboards (Visual Management). When creating these dashboards make sure that they will answer your Stakeholders questions.

Align Daily Actions

Your daily actions should get you towards fulfilling your objectives you laid out in your 30-60-90 days plan and positively impact the KPIs you have defined and are measuring. Essential for this is a daily 15 minute "Flash Meeting" or "Stand-up"

Work with Process Suppliers

Testing is more often seen as an activity at the end of a development, engineering or implementation process. However, Testing should be involved from the beginning of the process (see "Surgical Team" from the Mythical Man Month") and work closely with Business Analysts and System Engineers to understand the requirements for the product to be developed or the system to be implemented and ensure that these requirements can be tested and "signed-off" (Acceptance Criteria). Test should also work with Project and , Engineering Management to "evangelise" a "Design for Test" or "Behavior/Test Driven" approach. Even though it is an old text - some people say it is the "mother of all agile" - Tom Gilb's "Principles of Software Engineering Management" will give you insight into the Enginnering Challenges that teams face when developing software. This insight will enable you to improve your relationship (through knowledge and emphathy) with your "supplying" engineering process.

As a Test Manager, you are dependent on getting a "testeable" product or implementation, so understanding how Project Management works and how the build process works (Continuous Integration/Test/Deployment/Delivery), including version and configuration control, and being able to influence this in the right direction, will make your life easier.

Following these key points above should help you to avoid the "chuck it over the wall behavior" and "blaming" game when things get hot.

Visual Management

Nobody (hopefully) likes to spend many hours each day creating reports that are out of date as soon as the "ink has dried". It is essential to employ the right tools that can provide the relevant information to manage the day to day as well as supporting insights into the longer term achievents of objectives and KPIs. Having understood your "Work Area" will determine how you implement this communication, ranging from individuals acessing dashboards whenever they need to, pushing out information by email, hanging up printouts, wrinting updates on Whiteboards, etc.

People

Motivating and Driving your Team (Step 3)

15 Minute Daily Flash Meeting

Use the daily meeting to motiviate your team, display energy and positiveness. Reiterate your plan and vision on a frequent basis.

Make Team Self Sufficient

Your team is not self sufficent if it requires you to be around to get work done. During your daily meetings, make sure that the team takes responsibility for their tasks and they clearly understand why things have to be done. Also ensure that the meeting happens when you are not around.

Get Team to update Visual Management

Give the responsibility for updating the information in management systems to your team, also show them how the information is used by your Stakeholders and what descisions, specifically the ones that directly impact them (like bonuses) are made based on this information. Make sure you frequently display that your are using the information, otherwise people will stop updating. Nobody wants to do tasks just for the sake of doing them.

Assign personal responsibility

In a similar fashion, make people responsible for certain areas (i.e. checking automated test results, test environment magament, knowledge management) and divert any enquiries directly to them before you update your Stakeholders. This makes your team more visible within the wider organisation and you don't have to micro manage. Just be careful, this is a gradual process and requires you to build a trusting relationship. You also need to be clear on your expectations.

Delegating Simple Problem Solving (Step 4)

Do not try and solve every problem for your team members, even if you know how and it would only take you 5 minutes. It is important that your team members take care of their problems but know that you are there to help and advise if they get stuck or overwhelmed. You also do not need to answer every question or respond to every challenge - let teh person asking the question find or define and implement the answer or response.

Process

Process is important to Testing. Good processes are not a guarante for great products without them, high quality products are even harder to achieve. Processes are everywhere. In most cases, the word process is a tarnished word because it is associated to administration. If you watch for example "Masterchef", then you will hear the word process quite a lot. In combination with work, skill, technique and talent it makes fantastic meals. Without process, i.e. how to beat an egg properly, those amateur cooks would never be able to produce a Michelin star like plate of food.

The same applies to the processes used in testing. When they become an administrative burden, then people will try to avois or shortcut them. It is essential to define processes appropriate to the organisation and the type of product or project. Products for medical, public transport and automotive will have different process requirements then a Photoeditor.

Process also implies actors. In many cases the diffence between certain processes is not understood because they are referred to as the same for example "Test Automation" but because the actors are different i.e. Tester vs. Developer, the process will be different. In these cases it is helpful to add another dimension, for example Blackbox vs Whitebox testing, and then define who will do what type of testing.

Developer tests are concerned with the technical level and work on smaller units as indicated here in blue. The key metrics that are tracked for developer tests are number of tests and code coverage (Whitebox)

Automated test are more concerned with requirements coverage and use code coverage as a quality of test measure. They work on the larger parts, i.e. what is visible from a customer perspective for example APIs and User Interface (Blackbox)

Tools & Technology

Every craftsman will tell you that using the right tools is half the job done. So it is in testing. There is little value in "saving" money, just because a tool does have a licence fee attached. In many cases, the cost of the human effort to compensate for bad tooling is much higher compared to the cost of the tool.

Some of the technology used as part of testing is determined by the products that need to be tested. However, it is essential to keep up with market trends and ensure that the technology used in testing is on par with the technology used in development or engineering, if not better. Not only is this good for effective and eficient testing but also good for attracting and retaining the right talent.