How do you build a testing team to take their capability levels to the next level

This is a for Test Managers / Testing Heads / Sr Test personnel who managed / are managing a testing pool.

This article discuss about how to go about building testing teams and enhancing their capability to ensure they manage expectations of the management, customer and the testing team itself.

The following are some of the necessary ingredients for building effective teams, including a Testing organization:

- Smart people are the first priority to build a test team besides process framework.
- Recruiting with care.
- Test Leader to stamp his influence
- Aspects like induction, early involvement of testers matters a lot
- the organization structure of the testing team (my preference is centralize)
- Strong knowledge acquisition to complement the BA
- keeping the team happy and motivated via rewards, promotions, team workshops, outings
- Training, share sessions
- Visionary Leadership
- Customer focus
- Focus on delivering excellence to customer
- Managing for innovation
- Management by facts
- Developing talent
- Agility
- Focus on results and creating value
- System perspective
- Organizational and self learning
- Giving new challenges
- No repetitive work
- Encourage them to take initiatives
- Assign coding tasks
- Automation Automation Automation
- Team spirit should be maintained and individualism should be barred.
- Understanding the strength and capabilities of the team and serving the right balance of
mentoring, motivating, providing regular feedbacks, KT and group discussions.
- Establishing effective and transparent metrics to measure the team performance to arrive at
patterns and arrive at corrective/preventive actions through appropriate action plans. This ensures
that everyone in the team are measured on the same scale and also creates a healthy
competitive environment.
- Setting short team and long term goals for the team and individuals and guiding them to
accomplish their goals.

There should be a place emphasis on the leadership vision, as creating a shared vision is vital for developing an effective team. The strategic direction of the testing group is determined by this vision. Very often the vision is stated in high-sounding jargons, which tends to dissipate somewhere into nothingness while percolating to the grass-root level. It is hence imperative to word the vision statement into more meaningful one, which everyone in the organization can relate to. Then next part is to convert the vision into a strong mission statement and communicate effectively to the entire team. If the team shares and owns the vision and mission statements, then the it creates a self sustaining positive spiral.

The second part is to create a strong customer focus. The scope of Testing activity should be defined in the broader business context of the customer. The innovations in testing team – in terms of building products and solutions – should focus on bringing better value to the customer at optimized costs, leading to better Return on Investment. Such value articulation is very critical. The entire process and work-system design should focus on the customer outcomes.

The third important element is developing the talent for Testing. The talent development revolves around the axes of (i) Developing the right attitude (ii) Imparting the right skills – both technical and behavioral and (iii) Empowering the people at all levels. Apart from developing the team, it is also important to maintain the engagement levels of the team. Proper reward and recognition system, which is based on merit and which creates a healthy competition, is very important.

The fourth element is developing the core processes for the testing function. These core processes should address both the Management and the Operating processes. These processes should be agile, in the sense that, they should not be too rigid, but should be able to be tailored appropriately to meet the requirements of the customer.

Another important element is developing the right systems for defining, tracking and governance of the right metrics for measuring the effectiveness of the team. These metrics should cover not only the operational part, but also the results part. These systems along with the right knowledge management system are the bedrock for sustained effectiveness of the testing team. This system should afford ample scope for recording the learning and to integrate them back into the core processes to enhance their relevance and effectiveness.

All above are valuable points. Building testing teams should start from you leading from front. Extra efforts needs be taken to achieve this.As a leader one should have significant achievements under your belt.