Can we replace Test Managers?

Hmm, Yesterday should be the first Wednesday after quitter day.? The second Friday of January is statistically the most of New-year-resolutions were dropped. One of New Year’s resolutions is to write and publish this every Wednesday. I almost missed writing this post. I had this on my Notes but couldn’t write it. Finally, here it is. I’m not going to quit. hopefully.?

There are two conversations I had in the past week, that still bothering me. let me wrap my thoughts.?

1. This post quote: “Product owners are the Test Managers of Agile”

My first impulsive response is “Wrong on So many levels”. had a little conversation, and stopped. Here are my thoughts on why I think this statement is dangerous.?

a. It talks about Roles(Product Owners/Test Managers) and a modal(Agile) as if they are definitive.?

The so-called AGILE in companies varies depending on the team or stakeholders. Let alone Scrum/XP/SaFe and others, even 2 companies using “scrum” Every Company/Team follows its interpretation (it’s a different topic altogether).

Then Test Managers and Product Owners, the roles/titles might be the same, again, the responsibilities vary. In one of my projects, I was the Release Train Manager, in another one, I was the Customer Success Manager, and in another, a tech lead for a test automation team. In all these projects, my internal role was “Test Manager”, again, the official/external job title varies.? The same applies to PO. There are multiple titles/roles/responsibilities in permutation here. Depending on the company’s size and budget,? you might decide to add/remove one of the roles. I have a PM, I don’t need a PO, I have a PO, I don’t need a Scrum Master. The quote comes on a similar line. I want the PO to “act” as Test Manager for the team, well, it is a business decision, not a technical one. Test Manager is a Full-time role. Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Project Manager are all full-time roles. every role has its benefits (and issues), if the budget decides to dump all these responsibilities to a single person, well, it works. The company doesn’t get 400% output from the same person, instead, what they get is 25% of each. It’s a trade-off and works in some companies. Eventually, when the company grows magically, they would bring back these roles as full-timers, or vice versa ;-)?

b. Managers of Agile?

The argument “a” can be disregarded, considering, it comes from a long-time Test Manager, so it is self-preservance resistance. Nope. My first encounter with Agile was in 2008. The team was following the XP modal. It has its shiny-object benefits while switching from a waterfall team to XP with daily story points, 6 hours of work, pair programming, and more.? Eventually, it wears off. Across projects, other models of Agile dropped off. SaFE became a competitor.? A modal of Agile “Scrum” had a mass adoption and currently, it’s used almost as a synonym for Agile. (side note: JIRA, and a daily standup, we are “agile”) . ?

I worked in both successful and failed scrum teams. The whole idea of a scrum team, or agility revolves around ownership, commitment, self-organized team of motivated individuals. If you don’t think the team is “not ready for self-organization” / “needs managers to track” and call them by Test managers, Product Owners, Tech leads, Senior developers, or any other means, simply breaks the core. I may be a Test Manager for the company, I may be the most experienced Tester in the whole organization, or I may be hired as a Product Owner, but that does not mean, your responsibility is to “manage” the team.?

Making a person “management”, comes with the usual side effects of the authoritarian pyramid-like structure within the team. When the program is introduced, the team slowly drops the ball of making decisions or having debates or conversations, they simply share their updates, and wait for the “manager” to assign the next task. It is not Scrum, not Agile, and more importantly this work team is worse than the waterfall.?

Do you think It’s not practically possible to build and run an autonomous team? its a myth. It’s mostly one or two people in the company who do not let go of the “boss” hat, eventually spreading as company culture. To be clear, I am not recommending here to “fire managers” level of insanity. The Seniors are needed. the managers should be good leaders who help cross-team, cross-functional level. I don’t want to be a “Test Manager” or “Product Manager” to boss around inside a scrum team, I prefer those roles to help the junior Testers to grow, and remove the impediments of the team, irrespective of the title.?

c. Test Manager because You don’t have a Test manager, but PO is TM because they care about quality or Doing testing?

This is another interpretation of the same quote. A Test Manager is effectively a senior tester. Not hiring a senior tester (again, cost reasons) hiring some junior testers, and pushing them around, without experience in Testing / Quality is one flaw. Another flaw is calling a team a Scrum team/agile team, where not everyone cares about quality or testing if you are not called a “Test Manager” or “Tester” is another path to failure.?

A Tester in any team agile or not is a person who recommends/monitors quality issues, as well as provides means, expertise, and or tools to the team. They are not just “manual labor” click-around buttons, that others don’t want to do. You don’t pull them when you need to and push them out, blame them when something goes wrong, and so on. You keep the tester person around the life cycle and help them to help you.?

And I don’t have a Test Manager, so I am the Test Manager is another flawed take, from the assumption that “Testing is just confirming already built requirements. how hard it would be”.? Like, No one ever said, “My team doesn’t have designers, So PM is the Designer” or “My Team doesn’t have a FrontEnd Developer, So I am going to work on that,”? or “We are going to replace Tech Lead, we will hire all fresh graduates, and the PO will work as Tech lead for the team”?

Don’t take that wrong, I am not questioning the Capability of a PO/PM or Tech lead/Test manager or any other roles. It’s all about capacity. You either work full-time on one role, or part-time on multiple roles. you cannot have a full-time outcome in a part-time level capacity. It’s a trade-off due to business-level decisions, never a technical choice, let alone a sweeping declaration.?

2. The second conversation? Something about Testing Metrics, had the conversation multiple times in the past and bumped into a similar situation recently. Will write on next post, next week ;-)?