Improving the State of your Testing Team: Part Four – Attracting and Retaining Talent

The greatest challenge in building a team is finding good people. But as difficult as finding those people can be, keeping them motivated and in the building after you hire them is where the real work begins. Almost the entirety of our improvement program in the Global Test Center (GTC) is based on talent management. Metrics? Nope. Maturity models? Nope. Best practices? Nope. They only way we are going to Continue reading

Exposing and Erasing Organizational Bias: An Interview with Keith Klain

In this very informative and revealing interview, Keith Klain discusses where biases among testing teams originated from, and who’s to blame for its negative, lingering effects to projects of all shapes and sizes. We learned that testers don’t have themselves to blame exclusively, but some serious self-reflection is definitely in order. Continue reading

Improving the State of your Testing Team: Part Three – Strategic Objectives

Whenever we start a new testing effort, one of the first activities is to define the mission. Why are we testing? Who are our clients? What information are we trying to find? Knowing your mission is an important part to successfully meeting your projects objectives and the driver for what you produce during the life of the project. Continue reading

Improving the State of your Testing Team: Part Two – Principles

“But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.”Thomas Jefferson

To inspire intelligent, thinking people to work together to solve large, organizational problems is a tremendous challenge. Creative people should not be constrained by process or managerial constructs that don’t add any value to their work. Continue reading

Improving the State of your Testing Team: Part One – Values

As I run large testing teams for fairly large organisations and have done so for some time now, the questions I get asked most often are about how to improve testings position and how do I talk about testing with “senior management”. Continue reading