Operational leadership
You can easily imagine that great strategy with poor execution cannot lead to a good result. However, great execution in software testing is somewhat hard to define. We can do all sort of things as part of testing but we cannot clearly know all the effort actually 100% contributed to achieve this big ambiguous goal, 'excellent quality of software.'
To give you some idea, let me give you a question. Which tester do you think is more productive or effective? One who finds lots of good bugs or the one who can prevent from bugs being created? The one has in depth coding knowledge of the application or the one who deeply understands and knows users/customers usage and expectation? One who uses test process/methodology that has been working successfully or one who wants to try unproven new process/methodology that possibly benefit testing effort? One who found 20 pri2 bugs or the one who found 2 critical/pri1 bugs?
What do we do to measure the testing effectiveness? I've seen many times that test managers seriously going through irregular bug burn-down chart categorized by priority/severity or test story points fluctuation to get some sort of meaning out of it. I know data will not lie. But do those data actually represent the effectiveness of testing? I would say no.
Operational leader executes and delivers based on testing strategy.
I like to emphasize one more time on "simultaneousness" Poor strategy ruins excellent execution. This is like building an excellent ship to go over a mountain. Poor execution makes excellent strategy a day dream. It's like a innovative and passionate person leading a team of complainers "that does not work in this company. you just want to do this to get visibility from senior management....."
Operation leader understands the strategy clearly and execute towards that. And operational leader helps to form excellent strategy.
Based on assessing the context of product/team/timeline/etc, if the testing strategy for current product is more towards CI and pyramid(ton of unit tests, many integration tests, a few UI/E2E tests), she will generate code coverage data from unit tests, come up with gated check-in strategy, gather feedback cycle and trends of integration tests and UI tests. She will continue to monitor the progress and tries to optimize the testing effort. Staffing will be leaning towards to the strategy as well. She will clearly deliver the importance of the strategy and ask her team to be best at those areas. If the testing strategy is more towards exploratory execution and user-centric, she will discuss with the team to come up with session-based exploratory testing plan, ad-hoc testing plan, think outside of box exercise, crowd sourcing, dog fooding and etc. She will generate data relevant to exploratory testing area, buggy feature, or qualitative confidence. She will also categorize the user based on sex, demographic, educational level, and etc to demonstrate the exploratory nature of the testing effort.
Operational leader respects professionalism.
Operational leader put her heart on everything she is doing. As a professional test engineer, she will do her best to accomplish any task. Brainstorming on test cases. Writing bug report. Writing single line of automation code. Discussion during test plan/strategy meeting. Discussion with Dev team and PM team. Solid execution and delivery. No BS. That's an operational leader. She is also looking to improve the process or methodology continuously. Just set herself to be the best in the industry, just a pure professionalism.
Often times, operational leader loves the work. Sometimes she dreams about work. This might sounds crazy but actually that happens. It's not like getting stress from work. Imagine, you are fall in love with video game and playing all day. And you're stuck at level 12 and you need to go home. Would you think about it? Dream about it? Do you want to be the best tester? then you should love the testing work. In any occupation, one that loves work always out perform one that works hard. Furthermore, testing is a special occupation. If you don't value your work or don't find interest, your life is hell in the company.
So far, we talked about strategic leadership and operational leadership. I'm a little tired. Will do the people leadership on the next blog.
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