thoughts from the test eye

In order to determine where you are heading with your test department it is good to understand where you are currently standing as a group and as individuals in the group.

Understand which way of working with quality that you tend to lean the most against. Use Brett Petticord’s Four Schools of Testing [1] as a start point for discussion. Did this rattle your thoughts on testing in any direction or in many directions? Do you have conflicting ideological beliefs about testing within the test group? Has this set the test group in motion in any direction?

What view do you have on testers in your organizations? Can anyone be a tester? Can anyone in the organization assist testing? Are you expected to create test cases that anyone can use when performing a test? Perhaps it is so that many in the organization think that the intelligence is in the test script, not the tester executing the script? Cem Kaner’s Ongoing Revolution of Software Testing [2] might shed some light on the subject? If you are viewed upon as a group of professional testers that is great, if not… what do you intend to do about it?

What view does the test manager have? Is he/she a former tester with experience from your business? Is he/she inexperienced with testing and is more of administrator? Does he/she make decisions about the test process and test strategies? Perhaps it is time you get him/her involved in what you do and where you think the test department should go?

If you are going in a specific direction, what is pushing or pulling you there? In some cases the company/organization is moving toward a specific goal or a new way of working, does this mean that your test department must change or move toward the same new goals? What platform do your company [3] lean towards? Is it the fundamentals from Scientific Management [4] or is from Management style according to Drucker [5].

If the company is trying to go towards Lean/Agile, what obstacles do you see if the organization is based on Taylor’s ideas? Do organizational structures, internal tools (resource allocation, time reporting, etc), project models, general thoughts and expectations stand between those goals? Do you think it will be a bumpy ride [6] or not [7], perhaps something else [8]?

What is the focus on education for the testers? Is there focus on ISTQB or Exploratory Testing, perhaps a bit of both? Does the basis for education align with where you are going or want to go?

Now… where do you want to go next?

References:

[1] http://www.testingeducation.org/conference/wtst_pettichord_FSofST2.ppt

[2] http://www.kaner.com/pdfs/TheOngoingRevolution.pdf

[3] http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/030224/24manage.htm

[4] http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/fwt/taylor.html

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker

[6] http://www.claretyconsulting.com/it/comments/agile-scrum-fails-to-get-to-grips-with-human-psychology/2006-08-17/

[7] http://martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html

[8] http://www.modernanalyst.com/Resources/Articles/tabid/115/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/1153/The-Next-Wave-Valuable-Products-First-Process-Second.aspx