For example, do you have a “Senior Test Manager”, a “Head of Quality”, a “Principal Tester” or something else?
I am looking for titles of specialists - if at some point, you move to generalists, “Software Development Managers” managing “Test Managers” for instance, the answer would be “Test Manager”. I also recognise test managers may well not be the senior testing professional in an org, just picking one title to use as a worked example.
If in doubt I am looking for the most senior test/quality specialist in your org. If you have a Test Manager and a Lead Tester in the same hierarchical, er, rung, feel free to mention both
Disclaimer to say - I hate job titles and hierarchy in general, but I am required to engage with it sometimes and feel it’s interesting to take the temperature of other organisations in doing so!
Well I work in consultancy so to be honest, I don’t know for sure. We don’t call ourselves " expert test automator" or “principal/senior tester”. I don’t think we do anything fancy with job titles since for us it’s more about how you deal with stuff compared to what fancy job title you have XD
Moving to consultancy company soon, my next role title is like a standard one “testing consultant” and the role can differ it depends on the project needs management, leading a team, tester, test automation architect … as @kristof said.
In my previous company, we have levels/titles like
My current org is a consulting company with a matrix organization - with line hierarchy and customer projects in each direction.
Independent of that is the job bands/levels - and that goes for all job titles in the company (even in HR ): Junior, Advanced, Senior, Principal, Subject Matter Expert.
The highest individual contributor/testing specialist is a: Subject Matter Expert (in Test).
All testing specialists refer to a (line) manager, who then refers to a director and then all the way up.
Although I did met a “Quality Catalyst” called Hannah yesterday, that was a great title, somehow, that happened on the MOT google chat thingy bit.ly/testerhangout I think it is called.
As a senior QA I find it interesting that the most senior in your organisation is the architect. It’s a great role, but is normally project/programme oriented - so the planning and decisions are about the project in hand, not the QA team in general. Architects are usually incredibly talented test gurus, but would normally be a ‘C’ in the RACI matrix for QA team management, recruitment and overall team strategy.
We have Principals - so a Principal Test Analyst and a Principal Developer in Test.
The Principal Test Analyst role is a very new role and so I am still trying to settle on exactly what they are wanting from this role as it is very different from the Junior to Senior Test Analyst roles on our product.
We have s simple structure with QAs, a test manager (doin the structure part of test plan ing) and then a few senior testers have s role as QA coach, and join the QA manager and test manager in various discussions along with guiding the rest of the QAs.
): Junior, Advanced, Senior, Principal, Subject Matter Expert.