Leadership
Contrary to what you might think, hoarding power and being involved in everything is not a powerful move. The real influence is in making room for others and lifting others up. Prepare the new generation in your field and enable them to grow. Cast the stage light on others.
Resilience
Having company procedures for everything is nice. As a testing professional, you have unique skills to bring to the table in trying and testing the procedures - what's the worst that could happen?
Leadership
What is blocking us is the perception that our testing skills cannot be applied outside (software) testing. Of course, they can, and often they are exactly what is required for other parts of the organization to grow.
Resilience
For the next sprint have a disaster recovery test. Of course, you have a plan for that! Having a plan for a disaster is nice but remember the old saying that backups are irrelevant if you can’t restore. So do test your recovery plans as well.
StaffLevel
Individual contributors can convey leadership both in roles and activities without being in the formal organizational management hierarchy. The practical organization for this can take many forms.
ITregulations
We need to be better a confirming the requirements consistently and continuously - also the compliance and non-functional requirements. The best way to do this is to go slow and build instrumentation along the way.
Risks
Recently, I was discussing test leadership with an experienced practitioner in the agile testing space 👋. The topic of aligning with management came up again. I skipped the topic then. But afterward, I kept pondering the question: How can we get better management buy-in for testing?
ITregulations
The Product Risk Analysis is biased toward functional risks. Let's consider a broader picture of the solution under test.
ChangeManagement
There are so many places where testing happens. Everyone plays their part. IT testers don't own the words "test" or "quality" - we are not the only ones who can design and perform a test.
ITregulations
We have long fought between functional and non-functional requirements in IT systems development. A new requirement character—compliance—is entering the stage, requiring you to broaden the scope of the testing activities.
ChangeManagement
There was a standoff in a recent project of mine. It had no gunslingers, hangman’s rope, or a pot of gold. The standoff was about how to work.
TestingIsTheNewBlack
Is this the first time you have a compliance testing challenge? It's not my first time.