Have QA Managers Transformed to Agile?

• This article is co-authored together with Mariia Hutsuk

In recent years Agile has become more and more popular in various organizations. As quality people in leadership, we faced a dilemma if our positions are demanding and would stay so in a couple of years more. Although the traditional management roles are gone, managers still have their place but their responsibilities and scope may look quite different.

In this article, we would explain how we transformed our duties to bring value and don’t kill Agile in our teams.

As Stephen Janaway cites in his blog post on “The End of Road for Test Managers?”:

“Being a Test Manager in an Agile environment can be isolating at times, particularly when the department is big, and the number of agile teams is large. It requires an ability to balance a lot of information, priorities, and tasks, across a number of areas. Stakeholder management and influence become key. Context switching comes as standard”

How should a QA Manager’s role transform in Agile?

DevOps becomes DevTestOps

The Agile manifesto appeared almost 20 years ago in 2001. Those statements made a real revolution in the IT field. Back then there were no technical possibilities on how to implement some of its principles like the following:

“Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.”

Luckily now we have enough technical DevOps ways to apply ideas of fast and frequent releases to reality.

QA Manager should build necessary continuous testing processes part of the delivery pipeline. There is no need anymore to plan 1–2 weeks iterations of testing to launch some features. Some testing activities can start even on the developer’s machine and first bugs can be written on a piece of paper. Some feature testing can be performed even on production.

You can build a new process with your team collaboratively. As a start, you just need to visualize your release activities. We suggest choosing your own way of doing it. It can be drawing activities with stickers and physical boards, playing the Pipeline game of Emily Bache, or even using some online facilitation tools like Jamboard, Miro, or Mural. This simple exercise would help you to identify issues and their solutions as a team.

How the release pipeline can look thanks to cards of the Pipeline game.

Servant Leadership over being a Boss

Modern Agile concepts like T-shaped specialists, servant leadership modified not just QA leadership roles, but leadership roles in general. There is no need of having a Boss in a team, who assigns tasks and communicates with everyone.

Look how Jason Yip is describing collaboration of T-shaped people:

Being a servant leader, you need to empower your subordinates to take independent decisions and build an environment of psychological safety. You can not know everything, by trusting and relying on your team you would receive a much better outcome. Her you have a youtube video about what servant leadership mean

Build a team of T-shaped Specialists

Each of us has some skills. Some people are specialists in one field, they are called I- specialists. They are experts in one duty and can not perform others. Some people are generalists and they have much expertise, but no deep knowledge in any field.

By being in a QA leadership role, you can focus on developing more skills for I-specialists and focusing on some deep-dive learning for all generalists.

You might have noticed that Jason Yip on a previous image painted just 3 T-shaped specialists and 6 I-shaped. It really reflects the reality. You would need less T-shaped people to execute the same scope of tasks and there would be no need for a boss mediator.

Testing Coach / Facilitator

Katrina Clokie in her blog “Test Manager in Agile” mentions, the Test Manager role as evolving to a higher-level position that includes:

1. Facilitation of inter-team communication across many agile projects within an organization

2. Presenting an aggregate view of testing utilization to high-level management

3. Personal support, mentoring, and professional development for testers

4. Being an escalation point for testers

5. Budgeting or forecasting for testing as a service dependent on organizational process

Forming End-End System Integrated Team

SAFE(Scaled Agile) has multiple Agile teams, each team is usually focused on their own feature and they will develop, test, and deliver an incremental working functionality at the end of each iteration. But the real problem arises when no one sees the big picture on how all team deliverables are integrated into one complete product.

QA manager can lead an E2E system test team that consists of a few testers who would test the E2E features that need to be tested beyond teams. This ensures that the integration between teams works well as a whole product. QA managers can provide insights into the overall product quality based on their test results and this is one major responsibility.

This team should also test the Non-functional testing like the Load test, Stress test, and Dynamic securing testing like the pen test.

This team should have testers with multiple skill knowledge on tools like Jmeter, selenium, Zap, etc.. Individual agile teams will not focus on non-functional testing, so the QA manager can take the opportunity of building this team to focus on all those areas.

Form Test Center of Excellence

1. Managers can define a test process that is common to all the agile teams that work across.
2. Standardized test framework according to UI, API, and microservice testing, unless there is a need for a change in framework.
3. Managers can enforce DOD manifesto into agile teams. DOD mostly depends on testers feedback and demo.
4. For more details on DOD please refer Siva’s article
5. Set Up a good signoff process from testers to Scrum Masters.
6. Make sure testers are not testing on Adhoc request, they should test only on the user stories planned or modified.

Set the Quality Metrics

The business always depends on good quality metrics. These metrics build confidence in the product that’s been delivered in Agile. Managers can take the role of defining and setting the right KPIs. Here are some of the KPIs that can be defined to measure the quality of the Product.

1. Track Automation Velocity
2. Test Requirement Coverage
3. Defect Trend — Open, closed
4. Regression execution Status
5. Automation Coverage for User Stories

Future of QA Manager’s positions on the market

The current market has a lot of leadership opportunities for Quality people and we assume that they would stay in upcoming years. Here are a few of those positions that have similar roles and responsibilities that every QA manager can consider.

QA Manager

In recent years the demand for QA Team Lead position with functional management duties has changed as in most cases cross-functional development teams have solo QAs.

However, the QA Manager roles are quite often open. Depending on organizational values it may include line management or not. Such specialists usually perform duties described in this article.

Quality Coach

Agile teams usually have big autonomy and are empowered to develop/test/deliver by their own resources. It is impossible to impact such teams with power. Therefore the appearance of the Quality Coach role is very natural.

Quality coaches stop testing by himself/herself and influence without power on others on questions regarding quality. This sounds quite complex. In fact it is not, it is fun. Quality Coaches should have a lot of patience and persistence. People would start trusting after the first successes and would be open to more brave changes. Quality Coaching is about fixing not software, but mindsets of people, who create software.

Product Manager

Product managers provide the deep product expertise needed to lead the organization and make strategic product decisions. They often analyze the market and competitive conditions, laying out a product vision that is differentiated and delivers unique value based on customer demands. The role spans many activities from strategic to tactical and provides important cross-functional leadership — most notably between engineering, marketing, sales, and support teams.

Engineering Manager

Some Quality people in leadership positions may find attractive an Engineering Management career path.

How do you measure the software quality? You can count the amount of known critical bugs or track lead time for changes, deployment frequency, time to restore service, change failure rate to understand the maturity of delivery processes. Read more on Paul Duvall’s article about matrics taken from “Accelerate” book by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim. If you measure quality differently, you can easily switch the focus and the mindset to manage the development considering testing as part of it.

To Conclude

Overall a QA Manager should stay abreast of new developments in the QA domain, evaluate new tools, and learn new methods. They should also constantly improve on those by defining activities, setting priorities, and balancing resources at the group level. They can make sure the teams don’t fall over each other, and that everyone is talking to the right people

Useful links for reference:

1. Test Manager in Agile by Katrina Clokie
2. The End of the Road for Test Managers? by Stephen Janaway
3. A QA Manager’s Role in an Agile Organization
4. Does your Agile team follows — Definition of Done? By Sivamoorthy Bose
5. Why T-shaped people? by Jason Yip
6. Pipeline — The Game that Delivers!
7. Measuring DevOps Success with Four Key Metrics by Paul Duvall