In my experience management wants data to change/improve processes. If the lack of information is slowing down testing, or if the absence of your feedback and buy-in is causing problems, they need to know that. Examples that they can understand and judge can influence change.
You may also want to consider how the test team can best use its time. Participation earlier in the project will take more time. Planning and implementing automation will take more time. And routine automation may take a longer lead time. Your plan to balance these tradeoffs and communicate them is essential to the success of the team and its projects.
If you know when these other meetings are happening or can form connections that would allow you to find that out then one option could be that you just start turning up at the meetings. Then if people see you providing value by being there it would hopefully lead to you starting to be invited.
Aware that to walk in to a meeting you are not really invited to could take a fair bit of confidence/self belief but it is a very direct way to exhibit the value of early test involvement to management.
I’ve been given the week to refine processes for the team (among other things) and I’m actually writing up what we’re going to need so requesting particular documents is going in the list of things to ask for. Currently, we’ve been given “testing briefs” which can certainly be useful, but, they’ve also been open to interpretation and so we get varying degrees of quality in these (I’m revisiting them shortly).
Being assertive is definitely something I’ve learned is needed. Hopefully, fighting every step of the way will pay off soon. And I’m encouraging us to be more curious. We are anyway, but, we have been finding it’s hard to know what questions to ask when we essentially join in the middle of a conversation. I’m thinking up the kind of questions we can ask to help give an idea of the kind of mindset we can go in with. Combined with assertiveness I’m hoping this will benefit us in getting up to speed more quickly while also providing input to the projects.
@hattori. Yes, this is something I’m very aware of. I don’t want to eat into our already limited time with meetings that may end up being detrimental to testing (even if they do make us feel better at the beginning of projects). I’m currently thinking that we’ll need a meeting with the team leads on a project to introduce us to the solution and so we can make sure we know the problem, business needs, requirements and high risk areas (among other bits of information). Even if we don’t necessarily get to input from an early stage (for now), we’ll be able to get information we need to be able to pick up the work. In terms of automation, we’re only in the conversation stage about it. Resource to do it will be a discussion to be had soon enough, though.
Yeah, this is something I’m working up to, admittedly. A lot of the time I find out it’s happening when it’s already partway through. I have asked to be invited to some meetings I’ve known about, but, the next step is making sure to actually provide that value, like you say! I have had some small victories with this and some project managers are taking it on board more than others which is a start, at least!
Be part of the broader team rather than creating another silo.
It is not about a team of testers, it is about a team of people that have the skills necessary to envision, analyse, design, develop, test, deploy and maintain a complex product/service.
So as I mentioned above.
How to start a test team in a company?
Ask yourself why you should start a test team and you will find out you don’t need to.
Don’t create yet another silo, join the others and help them test their product
I haven’t done it. But, it sounds like a topic that could fill a book and/or require many hours of paid consultation from someone who has done it well. So, my next thought is to search for a book because that option is the easiest & quickest to obtain.
Here is a book on my todo list. It might not have everything you need, but it has some tips on teams & more. Check out the table of contents.