Our final talk for TestBash Home is one that I see referenced every time people start a discussion about job titles. We are joined by long term Ministry of Testing supporter @martin.hynie to revisit his talk “What’s In a Name? Experimenting With Testing Job Titles”.
Have you started thinking about what you’d like to ask Martin about what has changed since this talk was first delivered?
We’ll be adding all unanswered questions from the talk here so if we didn’t get to your question, don’t worry, we will find you an answer
Unanswered Questions:
1. Charles Penn (Tybar) - I work at a consulting company, and one thing we really try to focus with on our titles is how to pick titles that our clients can use to compare us to other companies.
2. Rick Fox - What are your thoughts on hybrid roles like Tester / BA that have become more popular in the last couple of years?
3. Varsandan Csaba - The job titles are misused in many companies for the roles they are advertising for a new position (job). Are they doing just to boost up their credibility or they just simply not get into enough the meaning of those titles/roles?
4. AndreasBerlin - You suggest the tester being the driver of the project setups, but could it not also done by any other group (smart developer or project managers), maybe you overstep just as “tester”, but would have done the same as Dev/PM
5. João Proença - With your ideas from this talk, and what you learned ever since, what would you say is the best name for a group of people driving the quality culture in an organization today?
6. Selena Davies - Having changed the team name and being invited to the meetings that you were missing out on, do you think people within the business saw you as different people with different skills than when you were known as testers?
7. Honey Chawla - With job titles, cognitive biases come up and it results in such situations. Could there be a team without any job titles and deliver a great product? Why not bring a complete change in IT industry where any name-giving doesn’t exist? Is this a crazy idea?
8. Abby Bangser - What are your thoughts on team structures and individual shapes (specialists/generalists etc) today?
9. Masha S. - How to get your manager on board about changing the title?
10. Sam|so - basically the title “tester” has a negative connotation generally speaking right?
11. Louise Gibbs - How does the existence of junior testers or senior testers change things?
12. Shailin Sheth - It is good that it all worked out. But what if changing the title and framing new team would have failed? What was the biggest challenge you faced?
13. alt (Guna) - | would you do more experiments like this?
14. Shivani - What would be a new title you would like to experiment now?
15. Roman Segador - Do you think that the presence of several people on testing that is them by accident, and sees it as a temporary role helps to this bias? What can we do to promote the fact that QA /testing can be a whole life career?
16. Marllos Prado - Do you think much of this misinterpretation about testers role and potential have to do with the confusion company managers make about general engineering and software engineering -In special, when the company doesn’t have software as their main product?
17. James - Do you think changing job titles could have as much of an effect in a smaller company?
18. shabbir @ CDL - What do you think about Quality Advocate instead of Analyst/tester etc…
19. Laura Bullen - How do you handle a title change that you don’t agree with?
20. Marissa - This conversation about language is so interesting, but I’m curious how that can work across cultures or do all cultures need a shared understanding at least on certain subjects?
21. LSauce - Do you ever find that BA’s are not invited early on because if they are doing their job correctly they will point out the flaws of a “pet project” someone is trying to push or points out how existing tools could cover the area a project is supposed to address?
22. Priyanka - Some companies may recognise the tester role but do you think industry’s bias against the role is changing? Today if u ask someone that I could be a tester vs another role like DEV or PM, do you think the recommendation would be a tester?
23. DefectHunter - If there are many different job titles like this then recruitment wouldn’t be a problem? In Uk