QA Career Development

We had the first Quality Engineering Lean Coffee and the following topics:

• QA Career Development
• How to assess quality practices and maturity of a team
• How to attract people to get into a quality career
• What can help testers when there is no BS or RS documentation
• QA versus Dev Ratio (bottleneck)
• How to manage expectations on testing team and cross functional team.

The topic that most interested us and that we spent our majority of time discussing was QA career development. The main observations made were:

• The role of Test Manager appears to be dead
• Many QA’s and testers lean to the technical side as they can move into development
• The role of Quality Coach doesn’t seem to have a ‘next level’
• It might be useful to focus on skill sets as opposed to a role (Buffer was cited as an example)
• Don’t feel that you have to stay in Quality ‘roles’. There are many paths where you can have an impact on quality.
• People have a tendency to put themselves into boxes based on their role. Encourage them to think ‘outside the box’

(I would add here, that also people tend to put testing and testing skills into a box, so be prepared to work on that too).

What do you think? Have you worked in a company that has managed to successfully create a career path for Quality folks?  I’d love to hear your stories?

Next Lean Coffee Session will be on the 5th March 2019 and thanks to Fishburners for hosting at their event.

The searchability website has lots of stories about what testers career paths

https://app.jobholler.com/blog/searchability-gabbi/talking-testing-with-anne-marie-charrett

Four Stages of Testing Competence

What stage of software testing competence are you? Unconscious Incompetence, Conscious Incompetence, Conscious Competence, Unconscious Competence

Anne-Marie Charrett (aka Maverick Tester)Anne-Marie Charrett