We had a great online meetup with Gem Hill and we had a few questions that we didn’t have time to answer.
What areas tester needs to focus when they are moving up to the QA career Ladder? Do you want to recommend any book\ article for the software tester who moved to Lead \management role?
As a followup on promoting testing culture, what about UAT, where users are not used to software dev and agile and headlines game or testing, any tips on how to? especially now working from home during these corona times.
Oh, I’m not sure on this one, so I’ll throw it to the crowd as I’m not a management type person. The book Crucial Conversations is good for reflecting on your communication style so that might be useful.
I’ve asked some good folks to come give some recommendations so hopefully there’ll be useful stuff here soon!
Oof this is interesting! It really depends on your set up as well, I feel that UAT (User Acceptance Testing)'s strength is that these are users of the system and they have institutional knowledge that you don’t have due to not working in that environment.
Here are some assumptions I’m making in this answer:
You have UAT users that you’re working on something for (as opposed to a more A/B or Beta Testing set up)
They work for another company/in another environment
They are doing UAT on top of their normal day to day responsibilities (and more so now that lockdown is happening)
If these are wrong, apologies, but this is how I’ve worked with UAT in agencies I’ve worked at, and the only UAT I’ve done.
What do they need to know to help you get your work done? Do they need to engage with agile and software dev? Or do they need to bring their institutional insight and not really need to know or care about your set up?
What do they care about? How can you get them from where they are to where they need to be?
Can you run a session over whatever video calling system you use to show them how you test? Or share some testing notes with them?
Can they get involved with other ceremonies like retros or amigo sessions? If they feel they have a place to contribute and have things to contribute that might help.
Hope this is useful! Happy to answer more/differently if I’ve made a wrong assumption.
What areas tester needs to focus when they are moving up to the QA career Ladder? Do you want to recommend any book\ article for the software tester who moved to Lead \management role?
For this question there two books; The Pheonix Project and The Unicorn Project. They’re both amazing. I feel The Unicorn Project is better as it is more up-to-date, but they’re both fantastic books. They’re about building and releasing software, and give you ideas on how to take the initiative to improve how software is developed.