Dan Caseley
Aug 22, 2017 · 2 min read

Hi Antti,

I’ve been a Test Manager for 5 years, and am in the process of getting rid of it. I’m working through the required steps to remove my job title and that role from the business.

This is the second company where I’ve performed this role. In the first, I left when I was no longer required. This time, I’ve chosen to transform. I believe that something akin to a Test Manager is required when introducing testing to an established business that’s never seen it done well before. It needs to exist as a role that conveys the experience and authority to make changes to working practice.

In my current role, we’re dividing our team to squads, where each squad is responsible for work from inception to success (measured beyond release). To do this, the squads have adopted stronger pairing and communication, and there’s nothing much I’m doing beyond keeping an eye on practices to ensure insular trends don’t emerge and fostering the skills within the community of testers. That doesn’t sound much like a Test Manager to me, and that’s why it’s not required any more.

None of this speaks to what you asked for, which were questions that you find troubling about organizing software development and testing. The real challenge I’ve found is in removing from people’s mindset the idea that testing is a “downstream” activity. We’ve been through JIRA and removed the n-stage kanban boards and replaced them with todo/doing/done style boards — this helped infer that the entire team was responsible for getting the work items into “done”. But that’s not solved the problem for everyone. Your thoughts here are most welcome!

Dan

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    Dan Caseley

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