Test Management musings – Part 1

I set up this category just to jot down miscellaneous thoughts about test management.  I’ll see how this goes, it might seem like a bad idea after a while.  What follows are personal musings, often not based on fact, merely my opinion based on my experience and observations.

People are the only real asset that a Test Manager has. Yes, we have licenses for tools, we have test lab equipment but they are no use if we don’t have people.  A good part of any manager’s time is spent managing their people and Test Managers are no different.  Getting the best out of your people is key to making your team a success and having managed a number of test teams, development teams, Project Managers, Support teams, I think that testers pose a particularly different challenge.  

Since I started managing test teams (nearly 20 years ago) one of the things that has fascinated me is the characteristics, attitudes and behaviours that are peculiar to testers.  

We are, generally, an odd bunch, we see work life differently than almost anyone else in IT.  Our minds are tuned and trained to ask the “What if” questions whereas most other people in IT ask the “How can” questions.  Example:  If a requirement is phrased as “I want to grow tomatoes in February”, a developer will ask “How can we get sufficient heat and light in the English winter to grow tomatoes?”  A tester will ask “What if you get an early Spring, will mildew destroy the crop?” A totally different mindset. 

We are motivated by different things.  Any tester worth their salt is delighted to find a bug and the level of delight is different depending on how difficult it was to find it and how much effort we had to put in to find it.  Testers are only slightly happy to find a crash when inputting one field on the first input screen, that is too easy, but spend 2 days setting up a detailed, complicated scenario and finding a data inconsistency and the tester is over the moon and can recount this testing exploit to every other tester in the world with great enthusiasm (I exaggerate slightly!).  So, why then does the tester come to me and say “I’m sorry, I have found a serious bug in Function X” why are they sorry?  They have done their job well.  I do the same thing myself, I’ll go to a Project meeting and state, “I am sorry, we have found a serious bug and I believe it would be too risky to ship the system to live”  Why am I sorry?  My team have done great job in finding the bug and I am proud that they have, so why do I feel the need to say I am sorry?  This strange mixture of delight and expressions of guilt is a characteristic of every test team I have managed.  We are motivated by finding bugs but feel the need to hide our delight.  I don’t pretend to fully understand, although I have a few theories that I might put down in a later entry.

More on managing testers later (probably)