The day my boss told me I no longer manage a QA team

Curious the other day what Perplexity would return if I put in "Who is Simon Tomes?" I discovered that it didn't reference my own website. Huh? So I've been in touch with the blogging platform I use to find out why that might be. It's set to allow search engines and crawlers yet maybe there's something else going on.

However, it did find an old profile on Clarity which I've now deleted and a couple of posts on Medium. I've now deleted the Medium account as I think it's nice to consolidate where we exist on the interwebs.

The following was posted on Medium in October 2014 and is referring to a time in my career at the end of December 2012 and start of January 2013.

Copied unedited, warts and all. 😃

--------------------


The day my boss told me I no longer manage a QA team
and how I had to get over it pretty damn quickly.

I looked around the room. The other dev team leads all looked at me.

I could see their brains ticking over.

“Well what is Tomesy gonna do?”

F*** knows!

Yet after about sixty seconds of panic I had kind of worked it out.

A couple of minutes prior to this our development manager had just announced that he was shifting the teams around. There were about six team leads in the room and he was keen to mix things up ready for the start of the new year.

“So we’re gonna have a QA person embedded in each development team”

“Hey that sounds cool.” I thought.

“That means the QA team will no longer exist”

“But I’m the QA manager! Hang on a min…” I nearly screamed.

Thoughts continuing to enter my head.

“Great, no QA team. Yet another reason for developers to think that testers don’t actually add value”

I certainly questioned my value added ability and did wonder what the funk I was going to do with my career at this point.
My boss continued.

“So this is the new team structure and these are all the development team leads”

My name was on there. I was being labelled a development team leader. I remember thinking.

“I have to manage a team of developers! This is crazy. They can be so difficult to talk to.”

I instantly became defensive and held myself close to my tester roots. Another thought racing through my head.

“Developers are way more complex and harder to work with let alone manage. What am I gonna do?”

The silly thing is I kinda knew this was coming. For a while at each team leader meeting we’d discuss how we were going to switch the teams around at the start of the new year.

We often discussed how we found it really useful to have a QA person dedicated to a specific sprint team.

How it was sometimes difficult to juggle the commitment a QA person could give to a new sprint team in the early days as they were busy finishing up on their current project with another team.

Prior to this it was part of my role as QA manager to ‘loan out’ members of my team to sprint teams. The QA person was dedicated to that sprint team but they reported to me. I helped set their quarterly goals, did their appraisals and ran 1–2–1's. My QA team was a solid unit (if I don’t say so myself). We were QA and there was no messing!

So to recap what happened in the new world. The QA team was disbanded. Each QA person officially joined a development team and reported to that development team leader. I became one of those development team leads and I was also the QA person in my team.

The new experience as a development team leader was challenging yet extremely rewarding. I didn’t lose my testing chops as I was still testing every single day.

What I did see happen was what I had been wishing for throughout my whole career as a test professional.

The traditional role of developer and tester blown away by a growing mutual respect for quality

I actually got the chance to influence a bunch of engineers to help me write some seriously cool acceptance tests. I’m not a technical tester and have never written a line of code yet I managed to provide my team with the space they needed to start building a whole acceptance test framework.

They developed a test fixture API that could easily create a bunch of test data so it was ready to be used with the automated acceptance tests they were developing.

I would sit down with my engineers and rattle out a load of BDD scenarios as they created them directly in their IDE. It was a QA person’s dream come true. This is no exageration. I had longed for the day of convincing a developer that they should implement the automated tests.

I could now crack on with some real value add exploratory testing whilst the engineers in my team automated the obvious stuff that just needed checking.

So why is this relevant?

I don’t think this would’ve happened had I remained a QA manager.

Why?

Because I wasn’t close enough to the excellent engineers I’d been so happily raising bugs for over the last two or so years.

In the new world, the QA team I used to manage also got more involved in their projects right from the outset. We were agile and yes there was always a bit of overlap when some manual testing was still required as the next sprint picked up some new stories. Yet my old team were way more in the mixer.

Testing was no longer an afterthought and “quality” had become embedded in the head of every person in every sprint team.

I committed to ensuring that my old team would meet as a bunch of testers once every fortnight so we could share learnings. This kinda happened but someone was always unable to make it due to release commitments.

Yet the sessions were really useful. It was important to feel connected to the core of our profession and still feel like a solid unit even though we were no longer in the same team.

Now if you’re a dev manager who is thinking of removing the test manager role and therefore the test team, do have an individual 1–2–1 with that person before you announce it to the rest of the development team, even before it’s announced to a set of development team leads.

I unfortunately didn’t have that conversation and that sucked. So I recommend Toyota’s principle of Nemawashi. Give your test manager a heads-up first before doing the big announcement. Get them to think about how they can shape their role in the non test manager world.

I’ve got a few ideas as to what my role could’ve become had I not been offered the development team leader role yet I’m keen to get other views and experiences.

Now if you’re a test manager and you think this in on the horizon, first things first.

Don’t panic!

You are awesome and you’ll continue to be awesome in the post test manager era. No one will ever take away the core of who you are as a test professional and that is invaluable.

Embrace the change cos it certainly gets better.