Here are the tasks I have to perform in my “typical” working day:

• Read approximately 100 emails, most of which I have been cc’ed on or forwarded on with an “FYI” attached.  Most of which I really didn’t need the information, but you have to read it just in case there is a snippet that you really do need
• Respond to approximately 15 of the 100 I read.
• Send on approximately 15 of these emails to interested parties (with FYI on the front, naturally!)
• Write approximately a 15 emails.
• Attend, on average, 2 hours of meetings.
• Be interrupted umpteen times by all manner of people
• Analyse the previous days bug stats
• Check progress against plan
• Answer approximately 5 phone calls
• Make a number (can’t quantify) of decisions varying from the trivial to the critical
• Assist team members who need help
• Liaise with the customer at least 5 times

You can see that I don’t do much in the way of productive work.  I am primarily interrupt driven and I need to do parallel processing.  

Why am I telling you this?  Not to get sympathy, nobody gives sympathy to a manager!  I attended a talk by Scott Barber, who I have a great deal of respect for, and part of the thrust of his talk was that managers don’t listen to Performance testers and don’t understand what they are saying, i.e. we managers are not good at attending to the needs of non-functional, technical, testers.  

To some extent, I agree with him, we are not good at it.  I would generalise the point even further, though, in that it is not just Performance testers, it is all testers that are in our team.  

My rebuttal to Scott in an email I sent to him went along these lines.  I have a lot of people and things that are vying for my attention.  I prioritise my time by classifying each item requiring my attention by Importance and Urgency.  If something is high Importance and high Urgency, then it gets my immediate attention, conversely low Importance and low Urgency are unlikely to get any of my time.  I believe it is the responsibility of any of my team to assist me in establishing the Importance and Urgency of what they want from me.  In my experience, technical testers are the worst at this.  I am reasonably technically minded, but I can be (and sometimes am) blinded by the language that these guys use.  So if I am told by a Performance tester, for example, that the Pareto curve on the disk accesses on the EMC disk for physical buffering is causing them concern, I might start to glaze over.  If they, however, tell me that the Service Level Agreement will not be met if we don’t improve the performance of the database writes, then I am very interested.  

I am not asking for things to be dumbed down for me, I just want to have the headline as to what the problem is.  I can then delve down, if necessary, and understand what the low level reasons for the problem are and get it explained to me.  If I am given the low level information first, I can’t work out for myself the level of Importance and Urgency.

So, help us poor managers, give us a clue as to why we should be interested in your problem/issue/concern.  If you don’t we won’t be any the wiser, we may dismiss what you are saying when we shouldn’t and we will come across as not caring or as stupid.  We have a lot of demands on our time and I don’t mind being managed by my team and influenced as to what I should spend my next few minutes on, in fact I welcome it.