This is an interesting thread / conversation.
I’m a Test Manager… I was hired as one because that’s what the public sector organisation I work for felt they needed…a traditional Test Manager.
I don’t know if I have ever fulfilled that remit however. When I arrived 4 1/2 years ago, they were starting to dabble in Agile, scrum teams and the likes. I had been a QA Test Lead in my previous role; a role that was a line manager of testers, resource planner to keep all the plates spinning, quality mentor to those who sought advice, evaluator of risk and impact … but in all of this, someone who was hands on enough to test features, update and architect the GUI automation etc.
It was soon clear to me that this is what my new organisation needed, and not what they originally had spec’d the role to be: a writer of reports, a documenter of processes, a role that signs off on releases.
Yes I have documented our test processes, but our documentation is light and lean, intentionally so. In my time here, I have never written a report to the upper echelons that I can remember and I certainly do not sign off on releases. I was interested to read @geoffd’s reply above where Dev and Test need to “sign off”. I’ve never liked that phrase, as it assumes often unrealistic and unfair levels of accountability.
Here though, I have championed an approach where any one can “shout fire” at any stage but at the end of the day, how big is the fire? A blazing inferno or smouldering embers? Maybe it’s ok put production in a worse state for a short period of time if it means getting new feature x out and available to users.
None of our digital assets are “mission critical”… i.e. no one is going to die if we release something that falls below expectation so perhaps we’re lucky in that respect. We know we can always fix it next sprint and as release cycles get smaller and smaller and we move to trunk based development, the time period of any live issue is likely to be fairly short lived. What is important though is that I and others can then dig in to why something happened and use anything discovered as a learning point to the team.
I guess I coach more now. I trust my testers to evaluate risk correctly and conduct any required testing accordingly. They are given free licence to do that without interference from me…that’s their job. I couldn’t possibly “sign off” on any release… I’m not close enough to all the things all the time. If all the features have been through a level of testing with A/Cs met and the automated regression checks are in line with what is expected at that point in time… That’s good enough for me.
But what I am there to do is to advise how I might tackle something, I’m there to challenge a tester’s approach if need be, I’m there to develop my tester’s careers through L&D or assigning them to product teams that will expand their knowledge or skills, I’m here to work with the Developers to highlight where I feel we have a quality need that is not being met.
It dismays me that in smaller organisations, such support isn’t available for testers in the way that it is for devs or other disciplines.
Even though my title is somewhat antiquated, I manage Test and thus I am a “Test Manager”. So where have all the Test Manager’s gone? Some of us are still here… 