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2 ways of growing QA employee for non-QA managers

The problem

One of the top 3 non-financial things that motivate an employee is growth. And growth is one of the most important tasks of a manager. Sometimes the single QA works in a team without a QA leader. So his/her line manager can be a person from another profession, e.g., Product manager, Project manager, Dev manager, RND manager, etc. Working closely with DEV and RND managers, I’ve seen that sometimes it’s challenging for them to define a growth path for a QA, especially if QA doesn’t know how to grow.

Takeaways

This article should help managers in a situation when QA comes and says:

“Some time has passed, but I don’t see myself growing. I feel frustrated because I don’t understand what significant I managed to accomplish” and you as a manager are not ready to answer this question.

or

“I want to have a salary review”, but you as a manager don’t understand how to evaluate if QA grew enough to have a raise.

Before we start

Firstly, I want to agree on some terms to avoid misunderstandings. Let’s agree that by “growth” in the future we will mean an increase in the impact to a project or company by an employee — QA employee in our context. Let’s consider the following example of impacting: During the last six months, QA employee took ownership in writing project documentation (requirements, user stories, etc.). Before that, these types of documentation were usually missing, outdated or incomplete. As a result, now the team saves a significant amount of time by producing fewer bugs and spending less time finding the actual requirements and clarifying them.

Also, I would like to mention that this article will be only dedicated to cases when QA currently meets all your expectations. Otherwise, it will be pretty easy to grow him — give feedback on things that you think he/she should do better.

Prerequisites

It seems that we’re all set. Before we start digging into details of QA growth, I would like to mention few things that you as a manager have to consider before starting this topic:

1. Growth is a shared activity. In other words — QA should want to grow in the first place and be proactive. Make sure he’s ready to do that.
2. You should have a strategic vision for your project — a particular plan of what should be improved. Once you have it, you’ll be able to understand how QA can contribute to it (or QA can always try to explain what he can do);
3. As growth is sometimes related to the learning process, make sure you can allow QA to free some time for it;

Approaches overview

I would suggest two pretty lightweight approaches to consider if you want to build a growth plan for QA, but you don’t know what to start from:

“Bring me a plan” approach

Follow these simple steps:

1. Ask QA to do some homework and bring you the list of things he wants to improve. Ask him/her to trace every point of his/her growth to some projects’ benefit. For example, QA will learn how to write automation tests, so having a test coverage project will increase the delivery process;
2. Review this plan together. Remember that being a manager is great to have a strategic plan for your project. Here this plan will help you. Together with QA, see which points from his/her plan can be perfectly aligned with your strategic plan. Ensure there’s a balance between what QA wants and project needs (sometimes visions can be different, and you will have to negotiate).
3. When action items are negotiated, agree on deadlines, set up milestones;
4. If you succeed with everything I’ve previously mentioned, you’ll only remain with following up on the progress.

Notes:

• This approach will be more relevant for middle+ QA engineers who already can work without any supervision and take responsibility for the entire project quality.
• If all the growth points QA brought to you seem irrelevant for the project’s strategic vision right now, don’t be upset. It doesn’t always mean that you have significant issues. Sometimes there’s room for negotiation. Sometimes, you can introduce QA (if you haven’t before) to a complete strategic picture and think together if there’re more relevant and exciting things to do for QA. Sometimes, QA can even onboard you to his/her ideas, so you’ll add them to a strategic vision. Sometimes, you can dig into the QA’s plan and question some of its points with ‘Why’. And there’s a chance that you will find some more significant growth areas. Sometimes, you can agree that QA will do something less relevant for the strategic vision but will fulfill his/her growth points (if possible). The main point — everything is a matter of discussion. Do it together.

Expectation based approach

Follow these steps:

1. As contrary to the previous approach, you’ll have to do some homework first. Take your strategic plan and think about how QA can contribute to it. If that contribution requires QA to train some new\existing skills — excellent! Prepare the list of expectations from QA. The level of details for these expectations will depend on QA maturity. Mature QA can easily decomposite any expectation and see how to achieve in specific steps;
2. Present this list of expectations to QA. Make sure QA understands each item correctly. Listen to the QA position. QA needs to reflect on what you’re suggesting and see if you have the same vision as him.
3. Ask QA to prepare a plan with action items based on the list of expectations. Make sure action items have deadlines;
4. Discuss the plan. Make sure both of you agree on it;
5. Follow up on the plan execution.

Notes:

• If you would like, you can easily replace the word ‘expectations’ with ‘outcomes’ and build a plan from that perspective. Remember that the more mature your QA is, the more abstract and less detailed your expectations can be. Please find some expectations examples in the Cheatsheet section.

How plan should look like

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In both approaches I’ve presented, I’ve told you that eventually, you should agree on some plan. So you might have a question “how this plan should look like”. Don’t worry. Treat this plan as a standard growth plan for an employee from your profession. It just should have the main items of a basic plan:

• Be time-boxed. E.g., yearly plan, half-year, quarter, etc.;
• Have some action items, outcomes, expectations. In other words, you have to have some things that you can rely on when you follow up on it;
• Should be re-checked against the reality sometimes and be refined if needed;
• Both of you should follow up on the progress;

Photo by Felipe Furtado on Unsplash

Cheatsheet

Ideas of what QA can potentially contribute to besides what you might think of

Let it be your cheat sheet in case you can’t imagine what else QA can do.

1. Help to set up and maintain processes (kind of scrum master way);
2. Help DEV with test automation (SDET way);
3. Help with DEV-ops things (Test Ops way);
4. Take ownership over product documentation;
5. Participate in and improve support flows;
6. Do a white box testing (if skilled in coding);
7. Do a white box testing (if proficient in coding);
8. Increase the test coverage by getting professional knowledge in different quality areas (primarily non-functional), if applicable, e.g., Performance/Stress Testing, Security Testing, Accessibility testing, GDPR testing, Legal testing, UX/UI testing;
9. Participate in\lead meetings with customers (requirements clarification meetings, demo meetings, technical solution meetings);
10. Participate in non-professional activities if your company is up to them, e.g., organizing learning/knowledge sharing activities, being an ambassador of smth;

Some ideas for setting expectation/outcomes

Disclaimer! Make sure you understand that Quality — is the shared responsibility, so sometimes to achieve some strategic project improvement goals, all parties will be required to change something. But for sure, you can expect QA to suggest a solution.

So the expectations can be something like this:

• I expect you to migrate automatic tests from one framework to another;
• I expect you to prepare the quality board so I can see the status;
• I expect you to set up and maintain the process of re-prioritizing existing production issues so we can keep a pace of fixing them;

Summary

So, in this article, we went over two ideas of how to kick off the growth process with your QA employee and observed possible vectors of growth.
Remember, if QA asks you for growth already means that you have a proactive person working with you. Use this opportunity!
Grow your QA and let your project succeed even better!