Driving quality through servant leadership and critical thinking

A presentation at National Software Testing Conference 2018 in in London, UK by nicola sedgwick

The role of testers in the software development world is changing.

Testers are being embedded into teams, getting more involved with code, being involved earlier in the idea generation process and diving ever deeper into cross-functional teams. It is inevitable, therefore, that the role of test management is likewise changing.

With an increase of AI, Blockchain and IoT technologies the traditional approach of resource allocation, coverage matrices and test run metrics simply aren’t enough.

The future of managing software testing lies in embedding appreciation for quality with every member of the team and the evolving test manager can do this by:

  1. Using their existing testing skill of critical thinking to identify efficiencies and improvements within the team to increase quality (from pipeline flows to encouraging code review processes)
  2. Learning to work as a servant leader within the team offering expert knowledge or useful connections to remove blockers to quality in the same way scrum masters remove blockers to story completion.

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