Test Management & Consultancy

On Test Management

Since the early 2000s, software development practices have evolved from a traditional waterfall approach to more popular Agile methodologies, such as Scrum and SAFe.

The popular Scrum methodology puts the responsibility for planning and organizing testing with the development team, more in particular with the Agile Test Engineer. But the output of an Agile development team is often part of an operation that is bigger than one Agile team. Interfaces with external software and dependencies with other development teams push the borders of a test project beyond the Agile team.

A good Test Manager is able to oversee these borders and leads the act of creating a holistic Test Policy for the organization. The Test Policy promotes alignment and communication between Agile Teams and testers, and serves as a framework for the quality and quality improvement processes in an organization. It is the basis for creating project-specific quality plans and has the best chance of success when co-created with the Test team and other important stakeholders.

I have experience in creating Test Policies and strategic test plans for organizations and projects of all shapes and sizes. The test policy of a corporate enterprise can be significantly different than the one of a startup or SME. But there is one common goal that the Test Manager should always be working for: to create the best environment for the test team to thrive in, so that the organization can deliver great quality software. Whether that is in a corporate, waterfall, Agile or any other setting.