Until I joined the QA team, my job titles were either developer, senior developer or development lead. I was in fact the least qualified person to manage a QA team in a traditional sense. How did I get the position then? The long story short is that the QA director was let go and my development director inherited her teams. Then one of the QA managers quit and there was an open QA lead position so I convinced my manager and her boss, my director that she and I should lead that team as dev manager and dev lead respectively.

I remember the director asking me how I’d answer the question, that I have virtually no experience with all the HP suite of tools or know of typical QA practices. My answer was simple; I wasn’t going there to teach individuals how to do their job better. The folks on that team didn’t need someone to tell them how to do the job they were already doing for 10+ years. I was going there to learn how they do their job and show them how to work differently as a team with the developers. What was needed was someone who a diversity of experience who could bridge the gap, a boundary spanner.

While I worked as a developer, I saw developers as the customers of testers. The product they’re providing is data. The better the test case, the better the data. Also having a QA team provide the service of feedback by running tests is not as useful. Typically they take too long since they can’t code and it comes too late (after the wrong thing is built). However having data available to me in a way that makes my life easier when coding is valuable. I was going to show them how they’re test data could be injected earlier into the developers process as a result of their skills being upgraded.