QA Manager Required Skills

What a QA manager does
What makes a good QA manager

What a QA manager does

• Planning, prioritization of all the test-related tasks (use proven project management tools such as the V-Cycle or Scrum methodology)
• Writing the test strategies
• Reviewing the test plans
• Taking the responsibility of certain designs if people have not the required competencies
• Code reviewing
• Spreading expertise and good usage of tools such as bug-tracking database or versioning systems
• Delegating...
• Having people judgment skills to hire the right people
• Writing performance review

What makes a good QA Manager

Being a good QA engineer

Of course, a good QA Manager is first of all a good QA engineer. It requires additional skill, though.

Effective communication

A QA Manager must be an extremely good communicator. This includes:

• Report global status and risk analysis to top management
• Capability to communicate with technical and non-technical people
• Having the diplomacy to say "no" when global quality is not acceptable for release

Part of the communication is also the not so well appreciated "meetings". Meetings are useful to a good organization, though.

• For large teams, privilege:
  • Formal meetings
  • Scheduled and iterated on a regular basis
  • Production of agendas (pre-meeting) and minutes (post-meeting)
• For small teams, privilege:
  • Stand-up meetings
  • Not necessarily planned
  • Agendas an minutes not necessarily needed

Having and spreading the "customer-focus" vision

To have the QA engineers efficient in their work, they must have the desire to see customers happy.

Developing people

Developing people in a QA team as in any team is essential. The main goal is to improve the learning curve and this can be achieved by:

• Spreading best practises you've learn along your whole career as QA engineer/manager
• Organizing trainings (external as well as internal)
• Working in group to share competencies
• Leaving some time to people to let them learn by themselves

Bringing out creativity in others

This can be achieved by:

• Organizing brainstorm sessions on a regular basis
• Discussing a lot with QA engineers to lead them to have the "idea" instead of exposing directly the idea (if you've got it before them). A good QA manager teaches the "way of thinking" before anything else
• Explaining any decision you take so that the team get the intellectual process that led to that decision
• Working in group

Motivating people

Motivating people is also necessary. To do that:

• Be motivated yourself
• Share your motivation to the others
• Explain why QA is an interesting job:
  • Too often, people are reluctant to do QA because:
    "QA = finding problems = people (dev.) don't like me"
    The good way of seeing the job is:
    "QA = avoid future problems = people (dev./support/customers) like me"
  • The result of QA activities is immediately seen by the end-user which is quite valorising
  • Seeing a "manual operation" becoming a completely automated job is demonstrating how talented people can use machines to improve life
  • Thoroughly testing a feature A is often more complex than developing the feature A. It's then a challenging (so enhancive) task.

Team building

A "dream" team is a team where all people are technically very good in their job but also like to work together and appreciate each others. To improve the chances to have this happening, a QA manager shouldn't hesitate to:

• Organize events (these do not necessarily require expensive activities!)
• Have some chats together on the working hours about non-technical subjects when the whole team is present
• Have QA people cooperating more with other teams (especially with Development team)
• Have a beer together sometime ;)

Enabling changes

Changing for changing is a bad concept. Conversely, when something does not work, change is mandatory. The process of changing must go through 3 steps:

• Making an audit to see what's wrong in the process (i.e. difficult to maintain very similar test scripts)
• Determine with the team what has to be changed (i.e. setup data-driven testing)
• Implement the change

Decision making

In QA manager there is "manager", which means that this includes making decisions.

• Not being overwhelmed by stress
• Not hesitating to recognize a mistake soon - it is much better than trying to workaround for years the issue
• Taking innovative (or risky) initiatives
• Not hesitating to change the processes at risk to destabilize some people if you think it is necessary

Books about Team Management

Support XQual and click on one of the images below to buy a book about Team Management from .

   

Learn more about QA Engineer Skills reading the QA Engineer Skills tutorial.