A QA Manager’s Role in an Agile Organization
By Hovhannes Kasarjyan
The need to rapidly deliver software to clients has transformed the software development space into a fast-paced, high-velocity environment — one that is forcing software teams to code much faster and deliver features more quickly. This has pushed several innovations in the software dev space, including the move to DevOps and Agile practices as well as the adoption of new technologies like SaaS, microservices, serverless, big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Although these innovations transformed the software development environment and gave birth to a new technology stack, they’ve also made the role of traditional QA managers obsolete.
The role and responsibilities of QA Managers have been changed a lot over the past few years, mainly due to many organizations moving to agile development methodologies where there are clusters of Agile Teams working together to deliver business objectives.
Many QA Managers often feel confused about their roles and feel out of place when put in an agile context, especially when they were charged with the management of a testing team and defining QA processes for an organization. QA managers in agile environments face a conundrum: How do you understand your role when, in a strictly agile organization, it’s not defined? QA management professionals know how to work in a traditional waterfall environment. Understanding exactly what’s required as they move into agile projects is key to a QA manager’s success. In this article, we’ll go over several important points for QA managers working in agile environments.
Challenges for QA managers to overcome in an Agile world
No Testing Department
For starters, in a proper agile setup, there is no such thing as a “Testing Department”, where a group of testers is sat together, usually away from the developers and managed by a Test Lead or Test Manager. Also, in an agile environment, there is much less emphasis on heavy documentation such as detailed test plans which is usually the job of the QA Manager, writing these documents through traditional methods is their domain.
No Accountability
Gone are the days when the QA Manager was held accountable when there was a defect leaked to production. In Agile, everyone is accountable and quality is everyone’s responsibility.
No Day-to-Day Management of Testers
In Agile, business priorities change frequently, and the Scrum Team needs to accommodate the changing priorities. It is almost impractical to keep up with all the changes especially when there are multiple Scrum Teams in a large organization.
Role of QA Manager in Agile
Although the traditional role and responsibilities of a QA Manager might not be seen as necessary in the Agile context, still, there is a role for test managers in agile, and it’s much more strategic than it was before.
The role of the QA manager had to evolve to keep up with the changes in software development and delivery. Below are the responsibilities of the QA managers in the Agile world.
Lay the ground rules for testing cross-organization
QA managers do not have any authority over the Agile teams and especially not on the testers that may be under their direct management prior to shifting to Agile. QA managers will have to learn to let Agile teams grow in their path to becoming self-organized, independent and strong teams.
However, this is not anarchy; if in the past there were two main departments (QA and Development) now we have tens and even hundreds of new Agile teams that are self-managed. To allow the business to ensure that all the teams are keeping to the same quality standards as they do in a more traditional environment, there must be clear guidelines and ground rules that all teams must follow.
This is where the QA manager can help and use their experience, knowledge and technical excellence to set specific quality guidelines. The guidelines may include what testing methods the teams should use, testing tools, automation strategies, testing standards and the overall test methodologies to apply.
While managers should give agile teams a great deal of independence and responsibility to manage themselves, the organization as a whole must still function as a coherent unit. You must set a few basic ground rules, such as what testing tools to use, which methodologies to apply, how to define defect statuses, how to classify the state of a build, and so on.
Build Teams
The next role of the QA manager is to build the team wisely, with the right number of development testers and end-to-end QA architects, as well as to define their roles and responsibilities and how those roles work together. A QA manager should also ensure that testers are properly equipped to test their team’s particular development work.
Promote testers professional development
A QA manager should ensure that all Agile teams and especially their testers continue to grow as quality owners. By being the quality expert, the classic work of a QA manager is to ensure that testers continue to learn and develop even when divided among the different teams.
QA managers should provide technical lessons about quality practices, support testers in times of crises, mentor testers on how to perform their jobs in a new environment and ensure that they do not lose their identity.
Cross-functional testing
In an organization of multiple Agile teams, each team is usually focused on their own feature without knowing what other teams are doing. This means that each Agile team will develop, test and deliver an incremental working functionality at the end of each iteration.
The approach that each Agile team is responsible for a specific part of the project has many advantages but still one major problem. The problem arises when there is no one who sees the big picture and how all teams’ deliverables are integrated into one complete product.
QA managers (or any other new title) have the capability to perform cross-functional testing (AKA end-to-end testing) to ensure that the integration between teams works well as a whole product.
In addition, QA managers can provide insights into the overall product quality based on their test results and this is one major responsibility.
The authority for all quality issues
It is hugely important that the business has an authority who can quickly resolve all quality issues that may arise during the Agile development process. QA managers are the best candidates to take this role and act as the quality focal point of the organization.
Set the quality metrics
Metrics are the best friend of the Agile QA Manager. QA managers help the business by defining the quality KPIs and trends among the different teams. Let us review some typical examples:
- The number of bugs and their severity per iteration
- Team velocity compared to team capacity
- How many stories meet the DOD (Definition of Done)
- Defects found in production/customer environment
- Time to market
- Number of effective meetings
- Defects found due to miscommunication between teams
Quality metrics have another great advantage: they allow the organization to identify the weakest and most problematic areas in the process and make the necessary changes to ensure that they meet the quality standards.
Conclusion
A QA manager, above all, in an agile organization, should have a vision and set strategy. They should stay abreast of new developments in the QA domain, evaluate new tools, and learn new methods.
The QA manager must implement QA processes within the group and constantly improve on those by defining activities, setting priorities, and balancing resources at the group level.
The QA manager can also spend a lot of time in a release/project management escalation role. Making sure the teams don’t fall over each other, and that everyone is talking to the right people. So with all this — I hope you have the big picture of what it takes to be a QA manager in an Agile world.
