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helloā¦again
W.r.t. writing a test strategy whatās the best method for gathering exclusions for testing? I.e. what you shouldnāt be testing and why.
Hello!
I looking for Input/Thoughts on my Problemā¦
I am a QA Manager in Agile, for my Product. In the Company we got a total of 4 Products with 1-2 tester on every product. I am the first Testmanager in the company.
We got the problem that every tester thinks only in his product (which differ a lot, esp. technically) and isnĀ“t capable of helping out in other products, or test other products while someone is sick, paternity leave, ā¦
I want to change that, and the bosses are totally in on that plan. But how would that go in a agile environment? My first thoughts was knowledge transfer, pair testing/bughunts together on the different products.
But which approach is the right one when it comes to the organisational architecture? I believe that with the skill/mindset of the testers (and their intrinsic will to learn and improve) it would be best to have
a) a single QA-department which isnĀ“t hard embedded in the agile teams, where we can āsendā our testers freely to different products sprint-wise or month-wise for example
b) an agile QA Lead which tries to combine the knowledge-transfer and everything that comes with it with the ideas of agile.
problem is, the other testers arenĀ“t working agile yet, no one explained them how. There is no automatisation, no explorative testing, they still complain about where the specifications for the features are saved. (nowhere, they are now user stories in jira). No one helped them to transform, so i think a agile QA lead or a sole department could be the solution. I would be grateful for more thoughts/ideas. Thank you !
Hey Fury that is a tough problem. I wonder if it makes sense to also ask in the community of practice thread?
The reason I suggest that is by taking people off of teams and just sending them for short times I have seen challenges in building domain knowledge as well as strong working relationships across roles/teams. Community of practice may be something to think about. But in reality I think this is a whole other problem all together which you aptly call organisational architecture. Havenāt seen too much on here in that space!
I like what Abigail says. Keep in mind that any organizational structure, no matter how good it is for some things, cannot be optimized for everything. And just because a different structure may be necessary for some work, that doesnāt mean the overhead of reorganization is justified. Communities can be formed, based on work roles, skills, interests to address needs of the organization. It can be an ongoing community if needed, or just a one-time task force.
Hi I would like to contribute and also learn more about the Test Managment.
Iām a hands on QA Manager for several Mobile Apps and their Backend(s).
tl:dr
Guy is writing about his current situation and explains QA as a Service for a 70 people several project wide QA Department in the past.
Iām in a similar situation as fury right now
For your question fury. As Abigail start itās a though one! If you are transfering the conversation somewhere else, please provide a link.
Before I start I can tell you itās highly dependent on your company and how much allowance you have to change workflows etc. I have read many many many Posts where āeveryoneā is talking about QA doesnāt need an Department Director (some call it QA Manager), but from my position I think someone needs to have the hat on to decide standartization and setting up of guidlines. Although it should be always hands on working in the Testing Process of some sort aswell.
We are 2 āQA Managersā in Agile of each having a platform + our platform shares core functionalites of software from other internal teams. Before he joined I did all of the QA and we had a Monolithic Software which is now split up.
So we had the luck of starting with a very big information transfer from me to him as both platforms also are pretty similar.
Now after a while the both platforms are differing pretty much and we are also having issues getting to know the sides of the service software which is used by the other platform then ours.
We didnāt implement QA as a Service yet (will go into that below). So we yet have no other knowledge transfer then speaking with each other asking questions if we want/need to sync information, if something (all) isnāt stated in the documentation/feature-tickets/user stories.
Also we are holding once a Month a Meeting only QA, to sync what are our pressure points and how we handle things in general. If we find something one of the teams does better or worse we hold another meeting with the POs to sync that and fix the issue or make the other team happier/faster.
Although we are having a similar structure and are also sharing other service software we simply canāt help out each other on our own Platforms. Our week is far to packed to do something else. When one of is sick the devs in the team will cover the manual testing effort themself. That worked okish so far, of course leading to some missed also not documented but fixed defects but better then having the double workload on 1 person instead. Not that you get that wrong, the devs in my company are not Test Engineers they are fully Software Engineers doing Unit tests and final testing of their just developed code aswell simple code reviews of others. They only got some guidelines in case of QA is missing. (But i heared there is a magical unicorn (some Key Agile Methodoligy) where Testers and Devs (and DevOps) are developing and coding on the same level for the software and the Testing Process! - Yet saw no Job Offers only SDET but not allowed to code main software. ^^)
QA as a Service
In my prior company we defined QA a little different, due to the fact that the QA was more then 70 people. All Projects were synced in a 1 Week Scrum Sprint Meth. Some projects expanded that to a 2 or 4 Week synced intervall.
Each project had a Team of QA Engineers. A team got created when a project got itās greenlight and was in an Early Access state. When a team got bigger then 4 people following structure was implemented:
You got:
The QA Teams themself didnāt change very much. Maybe quarterly someone swapped teams because of knowledge transfer or interest. Or there was planned more workload which required more personall other teams got smaller and the team which needed help got bigger for a small time frame not even a fully week.
One more special point about QA as a Service.
We had the advantage that all projects worked pretty similar and had to use the same core mechanics. So we had a whole QA Automation Team which worked for all QA Teams.
King regards,
Loivado
Patrick (fury), here are a few questions for your consideration.
And a few questions for Guy, Florian? to consider.
I hope this is helpful.
Thanks hattori,
call me what ever you like.
Iām not sure if you mixed my 2 parts from my prior post. (The QA as a Service part was from another company situation. I will go on and answear it for my current situation.)
The situation as it is right now will not improve without interactions from us. Even if we would get further collegues we still would need to get a knowledge transfer into place.
The mangament simply doesnāt want to grow a QA department nor does it want to have more QA in any more positions right now. I made already several proposals to the CTO that we actually need more QA to fullfill all of our workload we have and reduce the workloads of each other by helping out when things go crazy, have the needed knowledge transfer etc. Iām not sure why they donāt want it, I guess it has todo something with keeping the dev team hirachies as low as possible or they wait until one of us QA Managers is ready to lead it. idk.
We both are the only QA in the whole company.
In a dream world we would simply hire 2 more QA.
1 Senior or Intermediate to cover the Service Softwares
1 Intermediate as a Standin which also could swap with us QA Managers to cover high workloads and create the knowledge transfer between the 2 platforms. There would probably still be knowledge left out for the Service Software as this one wouldnāt swap but that would be way more then what we have now.
Itās a rather small startup yet with āonlyā 16 Full Time devs, Plus some semi devs from BI which would actually need some covering too.
Hi Loivado,
Yes, I understood that QA as a Service was at a different, larger company ā just tried to use your terms to be clear.
As you know, the much smaller company is a challenge because there are fewer options for matching needs with resources. People need to be versatile and switch hats often. To me, it makes sense for the organizationās hierarchy to be low or flat. And your management probably knows that the test job is too big for 2 QAs sometimes. (They know devs had to help with testing, right?)
Given that your management wonāt increase the test staff now, Iād try to build good relations with other staff who can help with testing, so they are more willing and able to assist when needed. For example, is it possible to do some of the knowledge transfer before things go crazy, say with some notes or a short presentation?
Whatever you do, itās important to get the support and buy-in from your management. They have the authority in the organization, and they need to see that the two QAs are trying to improve the process with available resources.
I know this is not easy with your current workload.
Hay, i started a new job as test manager in an insurance company. I am the first QA guy, so i have to start from the bottom
The departure uses some automation tools and as bug tracker āMANTISā. There is no Test Management Tool for writing Test Cases or generating reports. At my last company we used X-ray in Jira.
Do you have any suggestions for a tool (price does not matter)?
Greez
sobsi
If anyone has a Test Management challenge that they might benefit from talking through with someone, let me know ā¦ happy to help if I can 
Iāve just started in my 1st Test Team Manager role and again here like fury we have testers assigned to single products meaning if there is any sickness there is no one to cover work load.
The testers are staring to do pair testing when they get time to get knowledge about other products. Iām really trying to encourage this to give more options on who works on what. Iām even going to be learning a product myself so I can get hands on.
Do any of you have any other suggestions of how the team can share knowledge of products without taking too much time out of a Sprint?
Hi Charlotte,
Perhaps use the ā3 amigosā
Keep up working on āwho works on whatā to share the load and make testing less a bottleneck in the team
Hi Charlotte,
Thereās no pain free way to do this but as a test team manager staff development is also sat with you. (its not all testing!!! )
So having your team take a āsupportā product to work on is a way of developing your staff and covering when your specialists are out. The method we use is simple mentoring.
Engineer A picks up the next test task normally done by Engineer Bā¦ Engineer B carries on with their normal work but acts as mentor for engineer A.
For us the tools are the same so its an easier exchange as Engineer A has the prerequisite skills to get started. Good engineers should get quite far on their own and just need guidance from Engineer B.
Its a good investment and worth the slowdown but make sure your team and the stakeholders are aware of the reasons and benefits before implementing it.
This works for us but might not work for all.
Good luck in your new role.
Wayne.
Thanks for this Wayne, this sounds like it could be something we could introduce into our pair testing sessions rather than a simple show around the sight. Iām also thinking that it would be more beneficial to keep our pairs the same for a few months so they are confident in the product before changing to another pair.
