Test Manager In Agile

When an organization transitions to agile, managers have to work across the organization—not just for managing the project portfolio instead of shuffling people around, but also to help team members with the inevitable stresses that come from working closely with others in a knowledge worker organization.

Role of Test Manager in Agile

Many QA Managers often feel confused about their roles and feel out of place when put in an agile context, especially when they have been in charge of managing a testing team and defining QA processes for an organization.

As the focus of a testing team switches to collaboration on products and projects, rather than testing being an isolated phase or service, it may feel like the need for a test manager disappears. I think there is a place for Test Managers in agile, but that their responsibilities and scope may look quite different to in a waterfall environment.

Because testers should be communicating their progress directly within their project teams, providing their estimates as part of an agile methodology and using just-in-time test planning, there is no need for a Test Manager who acts as an intermediary or overseer at a project level. If a Test Manager is required in this capacity, it's a sign of dysfunction within the agile team.

Also other factors that make Test Managers nervous are:

No Testing Department

For starters, in a proper agile setup, there is no such thing as “Testing Department”, where a group of testers are sat together, usually away from the developers and managed by a Test Lead or Test Manager.

Also in an agile environment, there is much less emphasis on heavy documentation such as detailed test plans which is usually the job of the

QA Manager to write these documents in traditional methods.

In Scrum, which is a popular agile development methodology, there are three main roles: Product Owner, Scrum Master and Scrum Team.

The Scrum Team is self-managing and composed of developers, designers and testers and the team itself is responsible to deliver high quality software.

QA Manager in Agile is not needed to manage the testers and the testing effort, as in Agile testers become part of the Scrum Team.

No Accountability

Gone are the days when the QA Manager was held accountable when there was a defect leaked to production. In Agile, everyone is accountable and quality is everyone’s responsibility.

When a production incident is encountered, everyone gathers together to see what went wrong and how it can be avoided in future.

There is no place for QA Manager in Agile, because it indirectly takes away team responsibility for QA which is the whole reason why good Scrum teams deliver much higher quality. It is important to realize that QA and thus testing, is inherent part of Agile development methodologies.

No Day-to-Day Management of Testers

In Agile, business priorities change frequently and the Scrum Team needs to accommodate to the changing priorities. It is almost impractical to keep up with all the changes especially when there are multiple Scrum Teams in a large organization.

As Stephen Janaway cites in his blog post on “The End of Road for Test Managers?”

"Being a Test Manager in a Agile environment can be isolating at times, particularly when the department is big, and the number of agile teams is large.

It requires an ability to balance a lot of information, priorities, and tasks, across a number of areas. Stakeholder management and influence become key. Context switching comes as standard. Often it’s not much fun."

More Developers Test

In Agile teams, developers are encouraged to test their own code and to write sufficient and effective unit tests to ensure new code has no obvious errors and to get notified quickly as soon as something is broken.

When we have a solid foundation of good unit tests that we can rely on, it removes the responsibility of testers having to test for obvious mistakes; instead they can focus more on exploratory testing and assist with UAT which doesn’t require extensive planning and documentation.

Instead I see the Test Manager role as evolving to a higher-level position that includes:

• facilitation of inter-team communication across many agile projects within an organisation

• presenting an aggregate view of testing utilisation to high level management

• personal support, mentoring, and professional development for testers

• being an escalation point for testers

• budgeting or forecasting for testing as a service dependent on organisational process

Other areas where Test Managers in Agile can add value are:

• Be an advocate of QA throughout the organization

• Recruitment of QAs and Automation Engineers

• Providing technical expertise, e.g. proper use of test techniques in appropriate cases

• Ensuring the teams (Scrum Teams) implement and follow best practices to prevent defects

So Test managers infact become “practice managers”, who are responsible to get the best possible testers and make them available to a team, but then step away. Test management activity can also become similar to coaching, mentoring testers and educating them, hiring, helping people through their career. These responsibilities still exist and that is where the responsibilities should be in terms of management.