Where did all the Test managers go?

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21

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 unpleasant.

I’ve only had this happen once in my career and it was a company that in hindsight didn’t value or support me. The many other times where this has happened, I somehow commanded enough respect with the team that when I found something, peopled listened.

What was your experience like? Do you think it was the org structure or more of a cultural problem?

22

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 career development. This need not be their line manager, indeed some companies don’t have line management structures.

Thought should be put into providing support and guidance, otherwise I think companies are at best loosing out on developing and retaining talent, and at worst neglect in their duty of care for their employees.

23

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 above the parapet.
The frustration I had in that previous company was one where, whenever I offered caution or tried to suggest that a release wasn’t ready for production and we should wait because x or y. It was ignored. More frustrating is when they get away with it, and nothing bad happens as a consequence.
I have no problem saying “I told you so” when things do go bang though :slight_smile:

Conversely at my current company, our engineering VP (sits over Dev, QA and devOps) has listened to my concerns and pushed release dates, sometimes at the last minute. I know that if he does decide to push ahead with a release, he has at least considered my opinion.

It can of course work both ways, people tend to be the weak links of any process. But a process where one function is subservient to another can create a power struggle which needn’t be there.

24

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 Lamp principle is super important Davy lamp - Wikipedia that everyone in the team carries one.
So I wonder if it’s why agile teams got rid of the role?

25

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 free to speak up, but we have historically needed both development and QA to sign off, and that is often the remit of the managers. Product too once we added them in. If any one of those people questions the integrity of the release, it goes up the chain. That was the scenario I was alluding to. Not that it has happened often :slight_smile:

26

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.

27

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… :smiley:

28

+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 the testing progress to, or rarely discussed with(every quarter).

29

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 Managers is to setup new initiatives such as a test maturity survey and making sure the department runs well from day to day.

I actually wrote a blog about a generic day for me a couple of months ago - A Day in My Life as a QA Manager. Have a peek behind the scenes of the QA… | by Mark Ingram | The Tech Collective | Jun, 2023 | Medium

30

Whenever I see a notification for this thread I keep hoping that some test manager will show up and start rapping this song from the late DMX:

31

I’m not sure anyone can say that these days. Everything we do has secondary impacts type stuff is not “mission-critical”, but I’m sure everyone takes their job seriously, as a job, but almost everyone can find a place where we deeply do impact a user or significant benefit we provide falls away. We rely on “test-leads” and team-leads to keep us focused, but I wonder is some of the blame shifting onto them is a core reason companies used to hire “managers” in the first place.

I’m not sure everyone can shout “fire” senior leadership don’t want to hear about problems, that’s what they hire managers for. And so I guess that’s my definition of a manager, someone who is a very good umbrella whenever the shit flies. That may explain where they went.

32

Definitely a little “umbrella shielding” involved in my role… sometimes shielding leadership from stuff they haven’t got headspace for and is essentially our job to get on and sort.

But sometimes it’s about shielding the team… the testers, and of course the devs or anyone for that fact… from noise from above so that they can focus on what’s really important at that point in time.

33

I fully agree on the Best Practices part. Being Lead QA myself I noticed there’s lots of room to improve such things, especially if people never had experienced smarter/better working other than good 'ol manual imperative writing of test cases.

34

Just been pinged to look at a QA team lead role. I’m overdue not the promotion, but the chance to really see if I have it in me after a lot of QA experience, to lead and to code less. But the ‘leadership’ part is something I am keen to understand how people drop into leader roles in another company when you don’t even know the tech stack, how can you lead if you don’t even know how to drive the product? Does it just become more about reporting and people management when you lead and far less about the broader technical insights? I’m seeing a bit of that in @testrigor response from Artem, which has a certain appeal.

35

My short reply is, yes. Exactly that.

At least, that’s been my experience moving to leadership positions at different companies.

There’s a moment where you just can’t be in all the detail of the stack and product. Of course it helps if you learn some yet there’s a point where you have to trust the process and work with your team to build trust in their knowledge of the system, products and services.

Your leadership role is then able to take a step back and connect the dots across multiple systems. The dot connecting can be in the form of spotting patterns with ways of working and also helping build connections to people outside of your team.

You’ll also get to/need to ask lots of questions to help your team explore things in a way that perhaps they might not have considered. Those questions will get you a bit closer to the tech and help your team and the products you build.

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:

37

Yeah, it’s more about people than tech. Until my book is ready :wink:check out the leadership wiki
https://club.ministryoftesting.com/t/test-management-leadership-wiki

38

I’m wondering, if, in some orgs, whether QA sometimes just fall under OPS not alongside it. And QA might move into other team structure types like Support, so the test managers have not gone, they have merely moved into positions of more power?