A book titled “Managing the Test People: A guide to Practical Technical Management”

• One of the big mistakes: You’ve brought a problem to your manager without proposing a solution


• When you are looking at old performance review you don’t know who wrote it, so take it as input but not as the authoritative word


• Don’t exclude good candidates who might have similar experience but not direct experience with your product


• The test engineer position is not an analyst or test position. Engineers are expected to architect and write code.


• A person who doesn’t proofread their cover letter and resume isn’t going to proofread bug reports or test plans or test reports


• Job classification -->bit of information necessary to classify the job such as job title, job grade/number/salary range/experience. Job description-->this explains the roles and responsibilities and qualifications


• A lead is a person who has project and personnel responsibility. In some organizations leads never have personnel management roles, they have only project responsibility


• It’s not fair to add management responsibilities on top of someone’s technical duties without offloading some of their work.


• You can learn a lot from a bad manager about what you should not do!


• Time spent in meetings means time spent away from your “real” work.


• Everyone interprets information in terms of how it affects them


• Don’t take ownership of a problem that isn’t yours.


• Tester’s job is to provide factual information to the decision makers.


• Create an open and strong working relationship with your development peers: They can be your strongest allies or your worst enemies.


• Don’t break your own rules


• Keep meetings to an hour or less and surely not more than that


• Ten minutes should be enough time spent on a daily/weekly status report


• A natural leader will already be leading before the title change


• You are responsible for your people and their actions


• Project problems are the easiest to fix-personnel problem are the hardest


• Quitting and leaving a department you have built is one of the most difficult things you’ll do in your career
  

The list continues…..

The above points (a valuable lesson is the right word I can say) were taken from the book “Managing the Test People: Judy McKay: A guide to Practical Technical Management”.

In my 7.5 years of software testing experience I had learnt only a few of them mentioned above but so many of them were new since everyone’s career is an ongoing learning. Judy explained a lot of them with her 20 years of technical and practical expertise. Once started reading these points I got happy that I had learnt so many things with the expense of just 40 USD (Cost of the book) and a few weeks of time taken to read this book.

Thanks a lot Judy McKay

This is not only a guide to practical technical management. This is a guide to practical technical as well as people management. This is a very good book I can recommend to each and every tester, test lead and test manager in the industry.