As I’ve progressed in my career over the last 10+ years, I’ve worked in a number of team contexts and ways of working. I started off working in a System Test team, with a Test Manager, and Project Managers. I was generally put on projects, and assigned work. I had some freedoms in how I did my work,…

I’ve been thinking about your questions in terms of my career progression and it’s worked like this: My first job I worked for a big insurance company. I reported to a QA Manager and I think that position went all the way to VP. I don’t ever recall seeing a career ladder but I know people held hi…

I’ve always been a strong advocate for QA to not report to development managers. This gives us more autonomy and prevents some situations where QA may not want a release to go but are overruled by their line manager who happens to also be the dev manager. I had this in a past company, it was deeply…

[image] jesper: Can we expect the line manager to be knowledgeable of all specializations in the team? For those starting out, or in say there first 5 years of their career, I would expect to have someone who is experienced in the specialisation to be available to support learning, growth and…

Honestly, I think it was a bit of both. The org structure, specifically those in positions of authority within it, caused a cultural problem whereby the testers were seen as secondary, there to tick a box and keep quiet. It wasn’t appreciated if we stepped outside of our bounds or raised our heads a…

I’m not sure it’s any one persons job to “shout fire” when they think the product is not ready to ship. It certainly should not be the QA managers job to be the alarm. So I agree with you there, it’s a cultural illness thing when a company decides that one person is the “canary”. I think the Davy La…

To clarify, it’s not specifically my job to “shout fire” but part of the QA role has been to sign off the release. i.e. I’m comfortable that the release package is sufficiently tested and free of horrific bugs that I am confident we’re not making production a worse place. Any person in the team is f…

The trend that I observe is that especially is small-medium companies there is not really a QA Manager but a QA Lead that is “hands-on”. If there is at a least 1 QA per squad he doesn’t take part into a squad but sometimes they do.

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 starti…

+1 to the feeling mentioned here by Ben I’ve worked 12+ years in testing in 3 different European countries and have never had a test manager in the proper sense of the profession. I’ve had managers that: approved my holidays, rejected my training requests, and sometimes gave me a raise, I reported…

I am a QA Manager and most of my remit is split between line management and delivery management of QA’s on multiple different projects. More from a guidance and escalation point of view, I don’t attend every meeting and they are all pretty autonomous. The other main thing I do with my fellow QA Ma…

Where did all the Test managers go?

Discussions

simon_tomes (Simon Tomes) 27 November 2023 17:06 36

@conrad.connected.

Ah, I’ve just remembered a talk from @claire.reckless on becoming an Engineering Manager. I think a lot of similar principles and advice apply. I shared some notes on this post:

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The future of the Test Manager? Archive career-development	31	9094	31 March 2023
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Where did all the Test managers go?

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