Top 10 Tips for Test Managers from STP Online Summit

I had the pleasure of hosting the another Online Summit, delivered by Software Test Professionals: Test Management: Bridging the Gap Between Tests and Stakeholders.  The online summit format consists of 3 sessions each for 3 consecutive days.  The sessions for this summit were:

• Invigorating Your Test Team – Anne-Marie Charrett
• Talking to Triangles – Dawn Haynes
• Mentoring Testers: Leading from the Inside Out – Brian Osman
• Getting Your Testing MBA – Catherine Powell
• Whiteboard Test Team Management – Paul Holland
• Test Management for COTS Applications – Virginia Reynolds
• Motivating and Managing Distributed Testers – Karen Johnson
• The “Testing Bubble”:  Motivating, Insulating, and Protecting Tester – Ben Yaroch
• Top Tips from the Summit – Scott Barber
• Speaker Panel – Scott Barber, Karen Johnson & Ben Yaroch

One of my duties as host was to try to summarize the most valuable nuggets of information from across all of the presentations into a "top tips" list.  This is what I came up with:

Scott's Top 10 Tips for Test Managers from:

Notes:

• Not every tip is specific to test management
• Several tips are points made by more than one presenter
• Like every good “Top 10 List”, tips are presented in reverse order (according to me)
• I’ve paraphrased many of the tips to make them “quippy” :)

Tip #10: Learn the language of Business

• Opportunity
• Risk, Risk Mitigation, Risk Control
• Probability & (financial) Impact
• Scope, Time, Cost
• Profit, P&L, Profit, G&A, Profit

Tip #9: Educate executives using business language (and road trips)

• Otherwise, use analogy
• “Start driving, adapt as needed”

Tip #8: Coach your team on their impact to the business

• Scope, Time, Cost
• Risk
• Opportunity

Tip #7: Management is about balancing triangles

Tip #6: Test Management: Management is Management Test is Context

• 'nuff said

Tip #5: Empower, Motivate, Delegate, Bubble, and Trust

• Empower the team to succeed
• Keep them motivated
• Delegate important tasks, not just boring ones
• Be the "bubble" that shields them from "danger" and unnecessary distraction
• Trust them to do their jobs

Tip #4: Be Strategic *their* way; Be Tactical *your* way.

• As a Manager, its your job to ensure *your* strategy seamlessly integrates with executive & business vision
• Once you demonstrate that your strategy meets the needs of the executives & the business, you'll be free from micro-management and thus enabled to be tactical *your* way.

Tip #3: Filter Info up & down…

Tip #2: … in the audience’s language

Tip #1: Manage Things, Lead People

60 Minutes Interview w/ Grace Hopper

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Scott Barber
Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
Director, Computer Measurement Group
About.me

Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications
Author, Web Load Testing for Dummies
Contributing Author, Beautiful Testing, and How To Reduce the Cost of Testing

"If you can see it in your mind...
     you will find it in your life."