Transition from a senior QA to test manager

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Hi MoT Club ,

I am now in a test management role in one of the recent projects Iā€™m currently assigned. I have been a senior test automation engineer for many years now and I find this transition a great learning curve. Does anyone here been in a similar journey like mine ?
How can I be an effective person as a test manager , what else can I do differently,if there is a process in place and team of testers who do the testing ā€¦ How do you keep track of millions of things going on between an onshore and offshore team ? I have got imposter syndrome kicked in, so any ideas to improve my contributions would be appreciated :pray:

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Hey Swathika,

Cheers for your new role.

You have a great advantage as you are becoming a test manager from a testing background.

Sometimes, test managers donā€™t have testing background or hands-on background and they just stay disconnected from the team.

Few tips from my experience:

  • Give agency to your team
  • Listen to their thoughts and give credits (explicitly)
  • Donā€™t try to make more than 10% change at a time to start with (otherwise there are risks & fears in the team that you might just change everything).
  • Seek feedback from the team about the changes that you introduce for them. If need be, always be ready to roll back.
  • Understand the cultural aspects of both the shores (on & off) and then try to reduce the on & off shore barriers. Everyone should feel like one team.
  • Read ā€œBecoming a Technical Leaderā€ by Jerry Weinberg if you have time and want to have some amazing hacks.

Also, would recommend this video by Ajay B on this topic: Top 5 Mistakes of a New Manager by Ajay Balamurugadas (youtube.com)

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Congrats on the new role!

Clarifying question: whatā€™s the main thing this new role changes / the main challenge youā€™re facing? I ask because sometimes ā€œTest Managerā€ means managing the tests; other times it means managing people. There may also be elements of the role youā€™re already confortable with. So just want to make sure I get your question right before I send a long, irrelevant reply :slightly_smiling_face:

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Congratulations @swathika.visagn

I have been collecting information about leadership in testing for an upcoming MoT article :blush:. Here is a teaser of some of the places to learn more

Perhaps, especially the last one would be relevant to you

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Hi @cassandrahl ,

Many thanks for your interest.

The first and foremost challenge is testing team is offshore based , so I have to streamline processes for good visibility. During releases and application upgrades on various environments what value can I add as a test manager ? The test cases are already placed in Azure devops and executed by offshore ā€¦What other deliverables from my side will make an impact on the team ?

The other challenge is there is a third party team involved and I have to stay upto date on the communications between the offshore team - Third party - onsite team.

There are no defined responsibilities for me as I have to flesh them up so any advice on test leadership is welcome pls :pray:

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Hi @jesper ,

All the best for your article.

Thanks Iā€™ll definitely read through this and will get in touch with you :pray:

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Hi @parwalrahul

Thanks for your advice . Iā€™ll make use of the resources you shared and adopt your points in my ways of working !!

Iā€™ll definitely get in touch with you once I have got a hold of my role :pray:

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  1. Set up the goals for team. KPI or OKR or other methods could be adopted.
  2. Cultivate the culture. Emphasize some minds to the team to let them know what is the most importatnt for the team.
  3. Standardize the process. Check out the status in some key points.
  4. Encourage new technologies involved. Automation test and AI test could be practiced in all projects.
  5. Use some tool, like jira, to manage each requirement and task, update the status by owner in time.
  6. Assign any task to team members not yourself, so that you will have time to check it.
  7. Regular meeting, like weekly meeting, with core team is necessary.
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Hi,

  • Good communication with stakeholders is amadant, both in terms of personal contact and reporting structure.
  • Not sure what offshore means here, any possibility to meet the team F2F?
  • Good meeting structure, with an agenda. On those meetings prioritize whatā€™s important
  • Is there a teamleader offshore? Maintain good contact with that person. Like you say thereā€™s a million small tasks going on, you need to find persons you trust to summarize.
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Thanks for clarifying. The first thing that comes to mind is the testing strategy and plans. Whoā€™s responsible for this? The test cases already exist and are being executed, but are they still relevant / the right tests to perform in the situation? These are topics you could be leading.

Also, ā€œstreamline processes for good visibilityā€ is an interesting one. Are the processes inefficient? Is lack of reporting an issue? Is the testing work not visible to key people at the company, and is this impacting the perception / effectiveness of the team? I would say things like creating a culture of quality of doing some ā€œmarketingā€ for the testing discipline might also be good areas for you to look into.

Re the different teams, making things visible will hopefully help with this, as itā€™s not only more visible to other people, but also to you. I think itā€™s also important to maintain good relationships with people on all teams, and ultimately serve them and enable their work, rather than being a micro-manager or making their lives harder. I would also directly ask them what they want / need from you, and what improvements they would like to see. Think about the other Ps apart from product (project, people, processes) and think about how you could improve quality in those areas.

Something that might help you to generate other ideas is to think, ā€œnow that Iā€™m not busy with the hands-on automation tasks every day, what other things can I finally do?ā€

I hope that helps!

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You have lots of unstructured kinda simple-by-form questions :blush: I can assume that you might be overwhelmed but how did you end up in this position? Sorry, it may sound harsh, I donā€™t mean to be toxic and I know that it wonā€™t be any help in the context of your questions but maybe youā€™re not ready for these changes. Maybe you donā€™t have what it takes and itā€™s not about your skills per se but about what you want and like, Maybe the transition from to test automation engineer to a QA manager is too rapid and you just lack some leadership and managerial skills. I mean itā€™s nice that you want to learn stuff and looking for advice but it doesnā€™t work like that and sometimes itā€™s better to stick with technical stuff, especially as a test automation engineer I believe you will be in bigger demand and money is also not worse than in a QA manager position

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The challenges can change based on the structure of the teams. You have on shore and offshore team members. Are they a single team, multiple teams, or the QA resources embedded in cross functional development teams?

Is there any overlap in schedules with on shore and off shore?

Are any of the teams contractors, or are they direct hire employees?

A primary focus would be to try and do a few team building exercises. This will get a better comfort level and communication within the different teams. I would also try to schedule a joint meeting where everything is present to share experiences going on among the teams and help unify the team. We do this every sprint (2 week sprint / release cycle).

A challenge if the offshore team are contractors, as is the case with my company, is encouraging them the speak up, ask questions, share experiences etc. Some of this could be cultural, but many off shore / contractors just defer to the senior member in the meeting and it can feel like they are not engaged when they are silent. This barrier can take time to break down.

Goals can be set, but this also depends on the team structure. In some cases, having a team goal is more important than an individual goal, and they you can challenge them to share what specifically they have done to help achieve the team goal.

You should also set up 1-1 meetings periodically for them to share concerns, achievements, etc in a more private environment.

I also created specific slack channels for the QA team as a whole and for the automation engineers. Anything to encourage communication and visibility.

One other thing you should probably do if you havenā€™t already is to ask whoever promoted you what their expectations of your new position are, and most importantly, how to measure them so you can show progress towards those expectations. Is there a specific problem they are looking to solve? Donā€™t go in blind.

I hope some of this helps.

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This is such a good question! Thereā€™s an assumption that as a career we can naturally go from a deep technical specialist to test management without much training. Probably we need more training materials and blogs on the topic tbh!

The main differences from moving from being an individual contributor to manager is (to my mind) influence and scope.

  • A senior tester focuses on the quality of work in the team and can go deep
  • A test managerā€™s focus is wider at an organisational level

This means thinking about how to influence organisation level stakeholders on wider topics about quality.

  • Are we doing the right testing?
  • Is our testing efficient?
  • Do we have the skills for our testing?

To me, based on your message @swathika.visagn these sound like similar questions that youā€™ve had. Remember that youā€™re not in it alone and you can ask the tester to provide you with updates at the right level of information. You donā€™t need ALL THE DEEP information, instead you can look at trends and overall behaviours and signals. Ask for dashboards and metrics to spot where issues in quality and testing might be or maybe look for a holistic view of what good enough is and drive out any gaps in testing to be filled.

One thing I like to do is talk to stakeholders and get a view of what they think the problems are. Then I can look to address those, making me look awesome in those stakeholderā€™s eyes!

Youā€™re not alone, remember that you know about testing and that youā€™ve been given this role because of your skills. Itā€™s uncomfortable switching focus from low level work to management but youā€™ve got this!

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This is undeniably true.
To add to that, the persons appointed any managerial, teamleading role or the similar will hopefully have shown some leading capabilities and urge to make things happen on a group basis(There are a few examples during my 30 ys in the business when someone is chosen only on being a technical guru, not so good). One will have some own ideas on how to do leading matters and one should not be afraid to use those ideas. Of course, the learning curve the OP mentions will be there and one need advices and training too. But to not be afraid of using what feels best for you. After all, if you have been working longtime as a team member you will have seen eg meeting strategies you really think could be improved.

One thing worth mentioning going into a managerial role, is the new situation of being in a management team. The language and behaviors are rather different from the ones technician to technician. That was perhaps the biggest obstacle for me in my first managerial appointment.

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