There are many obvious technical expectations of a test manager, including:
Based on over 30 years of experience, I would say that the core skill of test management is not creating a plan and Gant charts; nor is it in producing regular, accurate reports (though all of these are important). The real skill is how you interact with the test team and manage your relationships with the project team and any third-party suppliers as a whole.
I have seen many projects pull in the best test engineers and assume this is all that’s needed to ensure a quality delivery. However, even with the best people, you need a manager who can mold and manage the team to work collaboratively to deliver a quality outcome. A good analogy for this would be some of our historic England football teams. They may have had some of the best players in the world but with less-than-optimal management they were unable to win any trophies.
All of the expectations above form part of any good project/test management training course available on the market today and some will even test the learning with certifications via various schemes, such as Prince2 and ISTQB. These certificates quite rightly give employers confidence that an individual understands and can implement test management practices effectively. However, what these training courses don’t teach is the individual’s ability with the softer skills, which I would posit are just as critical to their success.
People are a test manager’s greatest asset. A good test manager needs to understand whether their team:
Understanding what will be successful and steering the team to achieve this is mainly down to the test manager’s ability to negotiate, motivate and influence their team and their project and delivery stakeholders. These softer skills are relevant in all delivery models from Agile/DevOps to Waterfall.
If we look initially at identifying the right skills, knowledge and experience we first need to understand what the requirements are.
In the 1990s, anyone joining IT and testing was judged in two dimensions:
Today, the more mature companies identify resources using at least four key dimensions:
So using these four dimensions a test manager needs to understand what is needed, and if required understand what help is required to develop people who might have some but not all of these dimensions.
Examples of IT skills are:
Examples of test skills are:
Examples of domain knowledge are:
Examples of soft skills are:
Once you have a team you need to understand how they will all operate together. Each person in the team has a role, which can be defined as “A tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way.” The key to successful teams is a balance of roles.
In my experience the best way to do this is to perform a Belbin review. Belbin reviews look at the 9 key roles required to make a team effective. These roles are:
Finally, a good test manager will possess strong motivation, delegation and negotiation/influencing skills.
It is important that a team is motivated to achieve a common goal. Each individual will be motivated by different things, some will just need the occasional “thank you” or “well done”, some will need more support to complete their tasks while others will want to be given more and more challenging tasks.
There is a real skill behind understanding people motivation, while identifying demotivated people is somewhat easier. They may, for example, be disruptive, often late, lethargic and uncooperative, secretive, etc. Learning how to recognize and turn around any demotivated team members is a must have skill for a good test manager.
Delegation is one of the more important skills that a test manager needs to master.
Good delegation will:
Poor delegation will:
Good delegation requires trust on both sides of the relationship, and the test manager should always ensure the person being delegated to has all the information and equipment needed to succeed. It is also a good idea not to micromanage anyone whilst they complete their task, but to set a regular catch up to understand challenges/successes and provide guidance and support as required.
There is a path to success when delegating. Dependant on the skills and experience of the person being delegated to you might say:
Good negotiation and influencing skills are critical to an effective team to achieve a mutually acceptable solution for both parties which should ideally end in a win/win situation.
To negotiate or influence you need to be well prepared:
In testing these skills will prove invaluable when agreeing:
Excellent test management requires both the practical methodology skills and the softer skills discussed above. Equipped with the practical capability and the softer skills anyone can become more than a test manager, you will be a leader of an effective and happy team.
Paraphrasing Russell H. Ewing:
