Management – Simon Prior

leadership, Management, quality, Testing

Building a World Class Test Team

I’m starting 2022 in a more senior role, and it has been an aspiration for the last few years to build myself up to this point. I’ve learned so much since I left my first role in management in 2018 and moved towards more senior leadership roles. One of the big things I believe I have learned along the way, through both positive and negative experiences, is the value in building the best team possible and understanding both “what” that means and “how” you get there.

What does a World Class Test Team Look Like?

Obviously, context applies here, but in my experience there are some ways which have helped identify at a high level where we are on our journey as a team to become “World Class”.

A Good Test team could be classed as a cohesive unit which ensures products are released to a high level of quality. They may or may not be embedded within their delivery team, but they are trusted that the testing they do will discover the majority of issues before release. Automation may be in it’s infancy, but what they do have in place provides value.

A Great Test team would be the above and also may help prevent defects being added into the code as well as finding them during any test execution activities. They may also be striving to improve the quality practices within the teams they work closely with. They will have good amounts of automation to compliment their manual testing and are working towards the right balance

A World Class Test team would be all the above. They would also have a positive reputation across the entire organisation for being advocates for quality, thinking about the users and driving the business towards their aim of the best products possible. They would be a diverse and inclusive team who are embedded across the business and not siloed in one area. A constant and trusted part of all product discussions at all levels but not seen as a single sign-off for releases. They have worked with teams to ensure quality is part of everyone’s thinking, but work to continue coaching best practices to improve the confidence and view of quality. Automation is a big part of their testing, but they have a balance to ensure they are automating the right types of tests and compliment this with other forms of investigative testing. Most importantly, the team have a culture of wanting to continuously improve both themselves and the products

It’s obviously not that black and white, but knowing that you can improve the work you do should be seen as a positive to help move the team forward. Of course, the journey never ends, there are always ways to improve.

How Do You Build A World Class Test Team?

As a leader of a team (whether formally or as someone who is pro-active in wanting to drive the team forward), there are some steps you can take to help assess where on the journey you may be.

How outward looking are the team? – I’ve worked in teams in the past who have been very strong “9-5 Testers”, which there is nothing wrong with, but they tend to think the way they test currently is the only way to do it. By understanding where your team are, you know what you are preparing yourself for.
Assess the teams capabilities – knowing whether they are involved in looking at what is going on in the wider test community can help you start to understand their capabilities. Look into the types of testing and activities needed to test to the level needed to provide high quality products and find ways to assess where individuals are in their abilities with these activities. If there are gaps, look at ways to upskill the team members either through external courses, or online material and giving them time to learn.
Break the mould with new hires – You may have a good team of testers already, but are there gaps in their knowledge, are there areas of testing which they lack the skills to perform? These would be good places to start. But for me, the bigger area to focus is on bringing in resources who may evolve the way the team works, ones who may be active in the wider external testing community and hence are able to bring new trends and technologies to the table and encourage learning and sharing within the team. This happened for my team in 2021 and the way we work as a result of these hire has transformed in an incredibly positive way.
Engage them and show them that Testing can be fun – Try and move away from the “9-5 testing” view where you can, of course testing is an activity which needs doing, but it can be more interesting than just ticking a box to say a test has passed. Encourage the team to think outside the box. One way to do this would be to start doing some internal community events, whether it be an external speaker or even a group testing activity like mob testing or splitting into pairs and exploratory testing your product, working with someone you may or may not have worked with before. Doing these kind of activities will ignite an interest that some of the team haven’t had for a while.
Empower them to share outside the team – After getting the team engaged more, the next step is to create platforms for them to share the successes they have with the org outside of the test team. This could be via all hands, team meetings or even just sharing brief accounts of successes over email or slack. Raising awareness of the good work being done by the team will give confidence to the team and empower them to do more. This will help to show the value of good testing to teams across the business.

This is not supposed to be seen as a definitive list of actions to make your team world class, but this helped me get to a place where I had full confidence in what my teams could deliver, how they delivered it and what feedback we got as a team from the wider business. Building a positive reputation for testing/Quality has and always will be one of my goals for my teams.

Do I speak sense, or do you completely disagree? I’d love to hear from you!

Agile, Management, Testing

A Decade in Testing – How did I get here?

Ten years in a field of work I love, it felt as good a time as any to reflect on what brought me to this point. I still remember that feeling the day I finished my last exam at University in May 2006 and realised I needed to try and do something with the knowledge I had spent the last 3 years accumulating. I was adamant then that I didn’t feel I would make a good developer, University is a dangerous place for comparing your abilities to your peers and there are always those genuises who seem to know how to do all the tasks that take you hours or days to complete. I genuinely didn’t know what I wanted to do, but felt that the development route may be the best one.

To start with, the University has it’s own in-house development company called Seed Software where graduates could work for 6 months on commercial projects, so I joined there and started work on a .Net project for the Fire Brigade. Less than a few weeks into that, a position came up as a researcher in the University, researching Computer Crime. The project was called Cyberprofiling and was all about identifying ways to create a profile of criminals based on their activities online. I spent time learning Linux, setting up Honeypots and wrote a research paper which can be found here. This lead to my first public speaking slot at the E-Crime and Computer Evidence conference in Nottingham.

The funding ran out in the January and I was out of work. Going on Job-seekers was demoralising, but i found work as a Bingo Caller in a local club and ended up designing a member database for them which I believe was used long after I left. They certainly got value for their £5 per hour salary!

Eventually, after months of interviewing for Computer Forensic roles and graduate roles, I eventually was successful at the McAfee graduate scheme interview. For the next 6 months, I spent my time split between 3 teams in McAfee, one team was a C++ development role for the core Anti-Malware technology, one team was testing the Gateway Appliance hardware and one was doing Anti-Spam research. Out of the 3 roles, I enjoyed working in the development team, but even then, I enjoyed the testing work more. I even asked if there was an option of doing testing for the development team, and there, my interest in testing was born…

I joined the Anti-Malware development team as a junior C++ developer. C++ was the one language taught at University which I said I would avoid like the plague, it was a struggle to feel like I was getting anywhere with it. I could get the simple coding tasks done, but the whole pointers thing really screwed with my head and I beat myself up comparing myself to the team of developers who all had 10+ years experience. I learned a lot from them all and had some great mentors, but something wasn’t clicking for me

The team were using Scrum, so I very quickly became familiar with the process and started championing the agile practices, eventually becoming a Scrum Master for the team. It was at that point, I was told I was different to the others in the team and definitely had more of a people focus than the rest of the team. I took this and ran with it, did the Scrum Master course and worked 50-50 between scrum mastering and picking up dev tasks in the sprints. I then started learning more about the QA process and started helping out with test tasks to keep the sprints on track. I also ended up in our build room (yep an actual server room with a dozen different OS servers), I got to learn Perl/Python as I worked to improve the scripts used to build the software and burn it to discs for distribution). Again, here, I spent time testing the scripts and learning how to improve the scripts in any way i could.

Deciding to Make the Move to Testing

Eventually, in early 2010, in one of my performance reviews, I was asked what I wanted to do, and by this time, I’d built up great friendships with several in the QA team, that they had shared stuff with me. I told my boss that I wanted to move to QA and from there, I started transitioning over to the QA team.

My first testing project was our URL reputation scanning technology and I spent my time writing python test scripts plugged into our automation framework while learning and developing my skills both from a testing and also python perspective.

Over the next 2-3 years, I moved between teams in QA and worked on multiple different projects, eventually moving into a lead position where I coordinated the testing efforts across our globally distributed team. It was here, that I started to really have confidence in my ability to challenge and question features from a testing perspective and helped build a team to do this too. We became a well-oiled machine and helped deliver high quality software with a huge regression automation framework running thousands of tests across dozens of operating systems.

By 2014, I moved teams again and went back to being a QA Engineer working with a team that didn’t have a QA team apart from an architect and myself. Together we defined an automation framework in Robot Framework, hired some great team members and pushed the development cycle to new dimensions with CI and even getting QA involved in code reviews (I wrote about this here). It was around this time that I attended my first Testbash in 2015 and it really pushed me to start loving my career. I set up the Aylesbury Tester meetup on the back of this and started sharing my passion with others.

I found my voice, people started looking to me as the voice of quality, I had a place at the table of discussions for new features, new projects and process improvements too. The team had the respect to make decisions around quality and I started coaching and mentoring the team to push the boundaries and improve the deliverables and influence the end to end operations process.

In 2017, I became the Manager for the local team and a second team in Ireland and found a new passion for leading and coaching my teams. Building a whole team from scratch, using my principles written about in my #makeatester blogs and conference talks, while also nurturing the existing team who were set in their ways and trying to push them forward.

By the mid of 2018, McAfee was changing it’s focus and I felt i needed to look at something different, I jumped to try a more senior position as a Program Test Manager at the National Lottery. While the company was very set in it’s traditional ways around software, I enjoyed changing the culture and helping give QA a place at the table for discussions and not just be a team which executed 100s of tests at the end of a cycle. I was hellbent on raising the awareness of quality and ensuring a focus of testability and automation across all workstreams. It was an enjoyable year in a lot of ways, but i didn’t feel like i fully fit and needed to find somewhere where I felt I could be myself 100%.

This lead me to where I am today, leading the Core QA team at EasyJet, where my focus is on building a centre of excellence for testing which then works to assist the delivery teams across all areas of easyjet with automation and good testing practices.

Who knows where the next 10 years will take me, but I’m confident that I have found my niche and will be pushing ways to improve the focus on quality through coaching and culture changes for years to come.

I couldn’t have done a lot of this without a huge list of mentors and supporters over the years. Far too many to mention here, but I hope they all know how much it meant to me. I will continue to do my bit by paying forward advice and coaching to peers, team members and the wider community.

Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss how I could support you in you testing or leadership adventures!

Management, Testing

We’re Not Dead! – The Art of Effective Test Leadership

The Tech industry is evolving faster than anyone is prepared for and with that, roles within the software world are in desperate need to change too, no more so than in the Testing world. With the demand for faster delivery, more complex tech stacks and more fluid ways of working, Testing roles and activities need to move too.

Test Managers as they are currently

One role which has been particularly highlighted in the trend of “traditional roles are dying” is that of the Test Manager. Taken from a Techwell article from 2018, this quote sums up the traditional test manager quite well –

In traditional software processes, test managers are responsible for all management aspects of their team. They dole out tasks and assignments, hold frequent meetings to stay on top of progress, review and approve estimates, and often provide technical guidance as well.

This traditional TM role is no longer effective and maybe not even relevant in a lot of companies (not all!), so there is a need to evolve the role. This is coming from a passionate Test Manager who wants to remain relevant and move both myself and my teams forward.

A siloed Test team who are only involved actively towards the end of a project is no longer the norm, so a TM being the only contact to the test team until the test phase is no longer enough. In some environments, it was the TM who provides that early estimate of the test effort on behalf of the team and will then hold their own team accountable to this value, they decide all resourcing, devise plans and communicate progress to the wider business. Their team left in the shadows until something goes wrong during testing or a defect leaks into production at which point the team are thrust into the spotlight.

The knowledge and accountability for testing and quality should no longer sit on the shoulders of one TM. The role of signing off on the quality of a product should not be the sole responsibility of the TM or even the test team and don’t get me started on the term “gatekeepers of quality”.

The Change to Test Leadership

While in some (if not most scenarios), the title of Test Manager won’t change (at least straight away), the underlying role needs to evolve and be fundamentally different. The role ultimately comes down to the following priorities:

1. Building an Effective Team

Identifying what your team needs to be, starts with understanding whether you are the type of leader your team would want to work for. Are your team able to do their best work? Are they set up for success? Are you all working towards the same goal? Do they believe in your testing values?

2. Nurturing, coaching and empowering the team –

Regular facetime with your team should be an important part of your time in the office. It’s not necessary to have big team meetings every day, but being around for 1-1s (ensuring they aren’t pushed out or cancelled regularly) where the focus is on them and their personal development and not project status. Give your team the confidence to feel they are making decisions on your behalf. This only becomes natural to them if you have worked closely with them to ensure you are on the same page and you’ve earned your trust from your team for them to know you will support them. Coaching and mentoring your team on testing and how to effectively communicate to the wider delivery team should be a key part of your discussions.

3. Being an advocate of your team and also of Testing best practices

You should be your teams protection and biggest cheerleader. When their leader is taking a collaborative decision which they have been involved in making to higher levels or other teams, the teams confidence will boom. Equally, when something does go wrong, protecting the team from the immediate backlash and then working with the team constructively to resolve an issue with an attitude of “we’re in this together” will go a long way to preserve the teams confidence and trust in you.

Also, the other part of your advocacy should be to promote testing best practices to the wider business, find opportunities to get the TestSphere cards out with other areas and discuss all the great work your team and the wider delivery teams are doing to ensure high quality will help raise the profile of your teams work and make everyone aware of what testing involves.

It really is important that the team feel you are on the same journey with them and not focussed on your own agenda. Yes you are their manager, but manager doesn’t mean you are above them. Your team are your biggest asset and working with them will make them more valuable

4. Being a servant leader

Management can be a thankless task, but being there for your team has to be your primary objective. Unblocking them so that they can excel should be one of your primary objectives. “How can I help you?” should be a common phrase your team hears from you, and you should always be working with them to improve their testing ability, empowering them to unblock themselves.

The primary goal of an effective leader is something one of the best managers I ever had passed on to me:

PEOPLE over PROJECTS

Ultimately, this means that your primary focus should be building, enabling and supporting your team instead of being “at the helm” and being the sole decision maker for all project work. If your team feel you have their back, they will feel empowered to make decisions that you would agree with.

That’s All Very Nice But What About Getting the Work Done?

In the modern agile or devops ways of working, it is very unlikely that if you have more than a few people, that they will all be working on the same project or the same features, so there may be a need for someone to be overseeing all progress across potentially many streams. This may not be a Test Manager, it may be an engineering manager or some form of delivery manager where dev/test etc is all combined. But there will still need to be someone who is the Test/Quality champion who can help improve the processes from a test perspective across the teams.

Ultimately, this will require you and your team to devise a process where it is easy for you to keep on top of all the moving parts. This may include devising dashboards which highlight progress and testing pain points for you to assist with. It may also mean ensuring you have the right metrics in place for real time testing progress to be quick to access.

Ensuring testing involvement during the whole project, advocating for Testability and other ways to build quality in earlier should be a focus of the whole team, but having someone driving this from a leadership perspective will help move the team forward.

Can I Still Be A Test Manager?

You can, but the role is evolving. The focus should now on your team and raising the awareness of Quality Engineering/Testing, rather than leaving it as a siloed activity and you being 100% accountable for the quality of the product.

Management, Neurodiversity, Testing

Thinking Differently – Embracing Neurodiversity in Tech

Diversity has rightly become a big topic of discussion across many media and in the last few years there have been huge movements globally to try and correct imbalances in the workforce. These have included Race, Gender, LGBTQ, Age and Physical Disabilities. A lot of companies have worked really hard to close the gaps within some of these diverse areas, but for me, one which has been relatively quiet, especially within Testing or even the wider Tech industry is Neurodiversity.

Before I dive further into this, what do we mean by Neurodiversity? (Quote taken from ACAS website – acas.org.uk)

Neurodiversity refers to the different ways the brain can work and interpret information. It highlights that people naturally think about things differently. We have different interests and motivations, and are naturally better at some things and poorer at others.

Most people are neurotypical, meaning that the brain functions and processes information in the way society expects.

However it is estimated that around 1 in 7 people (more than 15% of people in the UK) are neurodivergent, meaning that the brain functions, learns and processes information differently.

To be classed as Neurodivergent, it usually means conditions such as Autism, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia or ADHD. There may be people within your teams that have one of these conditions and you may not even have ever been aware.

I have certainly worked with high-functioning neurodivergent engineers on both a peer-to-peer level and also manager-employee level. And I’m not just saying this for the sake of this article, but I have been awe-struck at time with how they have solved a problem or asked those questions that no-one else dare ask.

Certainly within Testing, it is not a role which requires uniformity or everyone fitting within the same box, we need out of the box thinkers and actually I found that one of my team was an incredible Exploratory tester, as his attention to detail was incredible but he had lots of ideas of pathways through the software which others would never have thought about. Indeed, a lot of the skills we look for in testing such as “Critical Thinking”, “Attention to detail”, “Seeing the bigger picture” are all things potentially in abundance within Neurodivergents. Although, maybe communication skills and stakeholder management may not be, but it comes to a point where we assess what we really need and can we work around the gaps in other ways?

I grew up with an Autistic sister, so for all of my life which I can remember, Autism has been something I have been very familiar with. This was added to, when I decided to fall in love with my wife, who for years has worked as a teacher in a Special Educational Needs (SEN) school, so I have learned a lot around Neurodiversity without really knowing what i was.

I do also think it is something that, the more I think about it, I have “quirks” which could be seen as “Neurodivergency”. I can relate a lot to my friend and fellow Testing Peer Chris’ blog post about his own self-discovery into ADHD, it could easily have been me who wrote that about myself. Maybe that is why it is an area which has peaked my interest so much?

In the workplace, I don’t feel enough is being done on multiple levels to ever really close the gap for potential Neurodivergent employees to be given a fair chance. 1 in 7 in the UK may be classed as Neurodivergent, but according to research done by Helen Needham for her recent TED Talk, they are 3 times more likely to be rejected for roles…

While I fundamentally believe that we should always hire the best candidate for any given role, are we even aware of untapped talent which we may have not even considered could fit the roles?

On an episode of the Super Testing Bros podcast last year, Lee Hawkins and Paul Seaman discussed their Neurodiversity project where they were teaching testing to autistic students. This was a fantastic listen and a great idea to reach out to a group not usually considered for roles within our industry. But it raises a lot of questions like the following:

How can we raise the awareness of roles within our industry to more Neurodivergent candidates?
How can we make our roles and our industry appealing?
How could we change our hiring process to make these candidates feel able to participate?
What could we do to make our work environment a place in which these potential employees would feel able to do there best work? Or what provisions could we put in place to ensure we supported them and helped them to be successful?

Raising the Awareness of Roles/Skills

As mentioned in the podcast above, Lee and Paul reached out to local organisations and had an Autistic charity take them up on teaching testing to students. So, I guess, in the same way some of us in the industry have started talking in schools and universities, another option would be to reach out to charities who are trying to help get people with Autism careers and working with local organisations to offer trainings of the necessary skills to get into testing or tech generally.

Making our Industry Appealing

As an industry, job adverts can be very varied in quality and detail. These can obviously be interpreted differently by different people, but think to yourself, would you role or company be appealing to a Neurodivergent candidate? Maybe they meet all the required skills to do the role, but don’t like doing presentations or talking to customers, would you be able to accomodate them and find other ways to complete the puzzle? We should see these candidates as a chance to see things differently, would they add something different to the team and make the team better? How can we therefore make these candidates want to work with us?

Making the Hiring Process Accessible

How do we feel our current hiring process would work with a Neurodivergent candidate? Is there any chance it could feel confrontational? How could you make it more accessible? Could interviews be carried out somewhere the candidate feels at ease? Could it be set as more of a chat, rather than an interview? If you know you have an Autistic candidate coming in, read up on Autism and learn about some of the triggers and things an autistic person may find difficult. A site worth browsing to learn more here would be medecoded.com – a site with experience reports and articles from neurodiverse employees and how they work…

Find a way to ensure you get all you need from the interview process but also ensure you’re not putting so much effort into the neurodivergent candidates, that you are neglecting any neurotypical candidates.

Enable Them to Be Successful

Ok, so you have hired them, but now, how do you ensure they fit within the team and the ways of working? Work with them to find a way for them to be successful. You may find the open plan office is a pain point for them, maybe they need a set of noise cancelling headphones to enable them to work in silence? Are there quiet areas where they can take themselves off to work? You may find they have some habits which seem odd to others, but will probably be partly a way of them self-regulating and keeping themselves calm. Make allowances for this and support them to ensure the team as a whole allow for this too. Ultimately, as with any employee, you want to help make them the best version of themselves they can be at work, doing all you can to nurture the talent will go a long way with that.

It really isn’t however about putting a label on these people, a lot are working perfectly fine within the tech industry already, but it is about considering them equally with other talent going for a role and learning a bit about how to get the most out of them, if you do decide to hire.

Management

My Personal Leadership Values

Following on from my previous post which focused on my personal testing values, this one will look at my Leadership values.

I guess the first point to elaborate on is what is meant by Leadership?

The dictionary definition suggests:

“The action of leading a group of people or an organisation, or the ability to do this”

My experience with leadership actually started as a teenager when I was an active member of the Air Cadets, reaching the rank of Flight Sergeant, meaning I was responsible for up to 30 cadets on any activity which we were completing, the go-to person for the adult staff members and even the one to be giving the orders when marching on parades or in competitions. This set me up with an understanding of what leadership/management could be, but as I decided not to follow the military career, I found that this particular style of leadership is often frowned upon in the workplace.

Since becoming a Manager and having a team which report to me, I was given a lot of guidance early on which showed me how important your people are and as daft as that sounds, I have experienced scenarios where this has been lost and because of this, I always try my best to ensure my team have everything they need from me. I even put myself on a Mental Health First Aider training course, so that I could be there to help my team if and when they need it.

So with that, I have 4 key values which I try to ensure I always show my team

Protect – I know in a lot of scenarios, the manager is the face of a team, it’s therefore important that you serve the role of keeping the team out of the firing line where necessary and also ensuring they are ring fenced from work/ distractions which they don’t need to be involved in. That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t go to the team to get insight on an issue, but you do the heavy lifting and ensure they can stay focussed on what they should be doing.
Nurture – Sometimes, your team members need to know you have their back! sometimes they need a metaphorical arm around them to let them know it’s okay! Not everyone can be on their game all of the time, a manager that recognises this and supports their team when they need it can be hugely beneficial. This also leads to encouraging them to try to improve themselves and helping to coach them down the path to the next level. Celebrating successes, however small, can really encourage them to keep going.
Empower – Sometimes, the decision needs to be made by the manager, but it is still important to take into account the opinions of the team, you may ultimately disregard them, but giving them the opportunity to have a voice can go a long way to building their confidence. Enabling them to make decisions and you going with them will help grow their leadership skills too. There is nothing better than to have a capable team of leaders which you have helped grow.
Evangelise – As well as protecting the team from the hierarchy, it’s equally important to take their work and promote it. In my eyes, the manager should be the teams biggest supporter and sing their praises whenever they can. A lot of teams I have been part of, have felt like no one knows what they do. That can be changed by ensuring you are their biggest advocate and try to ensure it is known what value the team provides.

Of course, that makes it sound easy and ultimately, it will never always be plain sailing. You will have to cope with difficult scenarios both within the team and outside the team, but having these values in mind will help you ensure your team has what they need to be successful.

Management

The “No Desk” Experiment – Working Closer With My Team

Ever since becoming a manager, my motto has always been “People before Projects”, meaning that ultimately, if I provided my team everything they need, then the project work would take care of itself.

Working for a big corporation which has a lot of moving parts, meant that for a while, I was consistently in 6 hours plus of meetings per day, each one believed to be the most important by it’s respective organiser. It got to the point where the only time I would read emails would be in the evening after the kids had gone to bed, and as for having time to spend with my team, well apart from my scheduled 1-1s, there was very little. Sure I would stop by their desks and try and check they were ok in between my meetings, but I felt I was failing them as a team. So i decided to try and change my days in the office.

Firstly, I made the assessment on the meetings I HAD to attend, compared to the ones I wasn’t compulsory for and could either decline or pass on to one of my team to attend instead. This in itself, cut my meetings down to an average of 4 hrs per day which can still be a bit overwhelming some days, but is certainly more manageable.

The next step was, how do I give more to my team, at least now in the period where I have two junior new starters? Firstly I changed my 1-1 structure, I left my laptop at my desk, took a notepad and pen and asked them how they were, how I could help them and tried to show support for what they needed. The problem with taking a laptop was that if emails fly in during the meetings, it was easy to get distracted.

Secondly, I came up with a drastic solution, which I trialed for a week. Whenever not in meetings, I decided I would literally hot-desk around the Development and QA team members, meaning I would spend time sat with the team, understand the projects in more detail and offer assistance in any way I could.

This meant I could start doing what I’d been trying to get around to before bureaucracy got in the way and that was coach my team members and use snippets of the years of knowledge I had to share. If one of my team was putting together a Test Plan or Test Scenarios, I was able to review them while sat with them, rather than them sending it to me via email and my thoughts being sent back maybe a couple of days later.

I was able to respond straight away to any concerns, we could go for coffee and discuss the issue as soon as they came to me, rather than me telling them I’d get back to them when I was free.

I felt more aware of the day to day project work and the technical difficulties the team may be experiencing, I was hearing it all first hand, rather than through chinese whispers by the time it reached me.

I was worried the team would respond negatively to me being around, maybe see me as “checking up” on them or trying to micro-manage, but the response I got from the team was hugely positive. Mainly because I was more plugged into the day-to-day work, they were able to start conversations on that level, rather than bringing me up to speed first before getting to the point.

I took them all out for lunch that week too and it all just added to the point I was trying to make with the whole week, I value them all and I want to ensure I give them all the tools and time they need to do their jobs to the best of their ability.

While the obvious solution is to try and engineer a desk in the middle of the team, that isn’t immediately possible, but what is possible is to find every moment I can to be available for them. That still means I have work to do and emails to read, but it’s about being organised enough to allow the time while you are all in the office together, to be as around as they need from me. The team will grow and develop and in the same way children become more independent from their parents, the team will grow and become self sufficient, then the job of coaching them will take a back seat and the focus for me can then switch. But while they need me, I will continue trying to make myself free for any time they want from me.

Management, Testing

A Change in Perspective – Moving from Tech Lead to Manager

I’ve been in Software Engineering since I left University as a graduate in 2006 and have performed many roles such as Software Developer, Scrum Master, Build Engineer and then in 2010, I moved into Software QA. At that point, I had several awesome mentors who I owe so much for fueling my love and passion for all things Testing/QA.

Fast-forward 6 years and I had moved teams and become the QA Tech Lead in my new team which are an Operations Engineering team. I finally got my head around the complexities of the systems we were responsible for as a team and was starting to move the teams focus to processes and ways in which i felt could move the team forward. So at this point, I felt I had got to grips with the production process.

In 2017, I started working towards becoming the manager of the local team and also taking on hiring a new team for a second project. That team were to be located in Ireland and I took on building that team from scratch. Hiring that team was my first real taste of management responsibilities. I had previously been involved in hiring from a “who would I work well with?” perspective, where as now, I was looking at the overall dynamics of the team, how they fit salary wise with the rest of the team and whether there was anything about them that might make them difficult to manage. This really opened my eyes to how things would change with my new role.

Over the next year or so, to now, there were several other parts of the role which opened my eyes to there being more differences than me just taking on line management duty of my team mates.

1. Trusting the team to be Technical

Once I got the Irish team set up, it became obvious that I couldn’t be the technical point of contact for two teams and had to start backing away from the deep down technical details and trust the teams to pick that up. It really became clear that I had to trust my team to pick up the details and I needed to enable to do them that.

2. Time is for your People

I soon learnt that to enable the team, it required them to be my main focus. Therefore, giving them all time with me, through 1-1s and spending time sat with them at their desks, meant that I started working longer hours to give them the time they wanted/needed and then still performing the other duties i still needed to do. Over time, this has got easier to manage, but with two teams on completely different projects, it’s certainly been a challenge.

3. Difficult Conversations

One element of the role which I needed to adjust to, was having to have conversations which I wouldn’t have previously had to worry about. It really was about working out where the line is in situations and then being strong enough to talk to team members when that line is crossed. Then also being consistent to ensure that everyone is treated the same way.

4. Technical Advocate rather than Technical Leader

With having to trust the team to take on the technical leadership role, it became clear that although I still need to understand the technical detail to some degree, I would give the team the freedom to advise me on technical directions, then be their advocate when talking to others about the technology, ensuring the team know I have their back and support their decisions. While also still offering my opinion and helping to guide the team, the directions of the team would not be down to just me.

5. Someone Resigned! Was it Because of Me?

This was a tough lesson, and caused a lot of over analysing and over thinking. But ultimately, I had to try and not take it personally. Then, secondly, try to turn it into a positive as it would give me a chance to re-build the team in the way that I feel works.

6. No Favourtism

Before I became a manager, I felt I got on well with all the team I worked with, but becoming manager changed the dynamics. Some suddenly started being more formal with me and I couldn’t understand why as I hadn’t changed. There were some members who I found very easy to talk to, but I had to show that I valued all members of the team. That meant backing away from socialising with them regularly over lunch or out of work and only really doing so when all the team is present.

The Future

I love my role and I love the fact that I am learning and developing every day. I value the work my team are now able to do, with my guidance and seeing them become more self sufficient, means I am starting to be able to focus on more strategic work and still see my teams move forward, knowing I have their back, encouraging them to do the best they can.