The question of whether ‘quality has enough of a seat at the table’ has popped up and it also aligns with the Leading With Quality conversations I’ve been hosting.
Some of us feel there are a lack of senior quality roles, and I’d love to know how true this is.
I don’t think it helps that our job titles vary so much, so I thought that one way to look at this would be to understand the org chart and where quality roles sit within it. What are the quality/testing job titles that exist and who reports to who? But also in context to this, where do we sit in relation to other roles?
For example, if there is a Head of Engineering, is there also a Head of Product/Quality/Data/etc?
Are people here willing to share their job title? Who they report to? Who reports to them? And then, how does it look and compare to other roles that exist within the organisation?
In my current organization, I directly report to the QA Manager, and above the QA Manager is the CTO to whom they report.
There are different micro-services, the one that I test is being directly managed by the QA Manager, so I report to her however, in the rest of the micro-services, there are people at Senior SDET (SDET-III) or Lead SDET(SDET-IV) who manage their own team but eventually report to my QA Manager.
We don’t have roles like Head of Product/Quality/Data, but we do have roles such as Senior PM, TPM (Technical Project Manager), APM (Associate Project Manager), and similarly, for data, we have Senior Data Analyst, Data Analyst, etc.
So we have a kind of vertical hierarchy in leadership, and I believe that’s okay… the lesser people more simpler the things are.
I know we’ve had conversations about this but I’ll give another perspective when my organisation was at its largest i.e. >100 employees with an engineering team of 30-40.
So then, the reporting line was CEO - CTO - Head of Engineering - QA Manager (myself) - Quality Engineer Leads - Quality Engineers. If you compare that to say customer success at the time you had CEO - Head of Customer Success - Support/Operations Manager - Team Leads - Support/Operations engineers. So there definitely was an imbalance in job titles.
I remember having a seat at the table in senior leadership meetings chaired by the CEO (mainly because of my experience) but the conundrum I faced is that I didn’t feel that the CTO or the HofE were talking about quality enough. I was the only 3rd tier leader in there so whilst I was happy to give my voice to discussions I felt I was covering for their lack of focus around quality.
As we contracted over the years, those layers have gone so I report directly to the CTO alongside the Engineering Manager and Platform Engineering Manager so it works far better.
So in hindsight, the bigger organisations get, I think the Head of Quality role becomes more and more important.
One of my thoughts around this subject is that a CQO or Head of Quality will need to be able to transform information about quality into something actionable for CEOs and CTOs.
They probably do not care about the details of a bug, but they do care about how that bug could potentially affect the bottom line.
Being able to understand the type of intelligence they need, and how a Head of Quality could be adding value to that type of forum.
I wrote something about it quite recently as I was in similar discussions:
We are a tools manufacturing company.
Quality is a cross department, talking mainly with Purchasing and Sales/CustomerSupport.
Because testing is quite new, I didn’t created a close relationship with Quality. I report to the CTO directly, and I’m working with the developer in-house team + externals depending the systems.
CEO > CTO > Tester
I’m currently the only QA in my team, which makes things both interesting and challenging. I handle all the testing responsibilities from understanding requirements to reporting bugs directly to the developer. There’s a tech lead I coordinate with often, and then we have a project manager who oversees delivery. But beyond that, there’s no Head of Engineering, Head of Product, or any defined “quality leadership” layer.
Because of this setup, quality often feels more reactive than proactive, try my best to raise concerns early and advocate for better practices, but without a dedicated role higher up owning the quality strategy, it sometimes gets deprioritized in the bigger picture.
Same as @ansha_batra , i’m currently the solo Software Tester / Quality Advocate in the team. We are a small group, so we’re pretty much open doors. i report to everybody, directly via standup/tech meeting; so everyone(ProductOwner+Devs+ProjManager) gets to hear the Tester’s evaluation of the product released in any environment(Test, UAT, or Live). I would liken our org to a circle where the people are nodes on the circumference, and info passes back and forth in straight lines between nodes. Release decisions(go/no-go) are therefore made by the group (emphasis on ‘group’), based on the Test Evaluation/s reported.
I’m in a consultancy/outsourcing firm, that mange IT for public and enterprise services of all kinds. We previously had a test center aka org unit with all the testing people. But for the last 3-4 years testing specialists sits with the delivery teams (devs etc) with a shared manager. That manager is not a “labeled” manager, as with the UK/US engineering managers. It might be a cultural thing here that the lower leadership levels doesn’t generally have a “label”.