Test leadership is required at organizational and operational levels in many organizations. In this tutorial, we explain the fundamentals of test leadership and have practical exercises to understand it. We discuss what leadership means in different scenarios, where effective test leadership is needed, and where leadership is all too often missing.
Testing leadership is always needed, even if testing or development is subcontracted. Especially in larger organizations, organizational leadership is needed for testing, for example, to set the vision, harmonize testing across teams, increase productivity, align testing activities, and support different management levels and teams involved in testing.
The tutorial utilizes the
ACT2LEAD heuristic about software testing leadership. To understand it properly, the audience is divided into teams with a brief exercise for each part of the heuristic. The ACT2LEAD heuristic consists of eight core practices of testing leadership.
We’ll go through eight principles in practice:
- ACT - how to add testing into all software development actions
- CONTEXT - how to choose the right testing based on context
- TRANSPARENCY - how to create visibility for the quality of testing practices and test results
- 2 - how to strike the perfect balance between automated testing and human-driven exploration
- LEARN - learning as a way to improve
- ENABLE - enabling a culture of quality and continuous improvement
- ADAPT - aligning testing efforts with product risks
- DIVERSE - implementing diverse testing approaches for finding diverse sets of defects and observations
The tutorial uses most of its time on several exercises set in the context of a large, imaginary corporation case study. In teams, participants create software testing leadership artefacts for the case study organization. The exercises are designed for the organizational level, but they also fit the team level.
The tutorial is ideal for roles like Head of Testing, QA Lead, and Test Manager. It is also good for anyone who wants to develop their competencies toward test leadership.
Each participant is encouraged to bring a laptop, though one per four people is sufficient. Internet access is needed, too.
Each participant gets an
ACT 2 LEAD Software Testing Leadership Handbook as an e-book, which they can use to study this topic further.
A high-level outline of the tutorial- What is testing leadership
- ACT2LEAD heuristic for testing leadership, including a brief exercise
- Organizational and operational levels of testing leadership
- Short introduction to leading people and change
- Exercise: Stakeholder mapping
- Exercise: Create an organizational-level testing policy (principles)
- Exercise: Create an organizational-level strategy (guidelines)
- Exercise: Extended retrospective for visibility and continuous improvement
- Exercise: Testing in contracts
- Exercise: Competence development
- Optional Exercises, e.g., on Shift Left, Recruiting, Visibility, People, OKR
