Tester Aided in Two-Digit Million Dollar Deal

Yes indeed. It has happened for me in the last couple of months. While my role is not tester anymore (but advisor in testing) – it just wouldn’t make the headline as click-baity. Sorry for that, though it does help to prove the point that testing specialists can be a part of bids and tender teams. A testing mindset is needed even before there is an “system development life cycle”.

The Dealing

In the context of bids and tenders the testing activities are mostly about technical writing around how the testing will happen when the dealing’s done. It’s not so much about finding issues – but more about a coherent analytic viewpoint. The customer of the deal often set up “requirements” that the supplier must answer and is scored against:

• Elaborate on a test strategy
• Elaborate on the suggested test process
• Describe relevant testing documents – don’t overdo them!
• Describe testing types and environments in use
• Describe test tools and approach to automation

If you don’t reply to all “requirements” you get a sub-par score, so being able to find information in the organization is key. The contractor uploads the final documents to the customer and the content is evaluated. The evaluation is usually a balanced scoring between the individual reply documents and the price point. Often price wins, even if the scoring of the (testing) documents where at 100% score.

More and more often I see outsourcing contracts that requests 10-15 test phases. It looks like someone has simply thrown the book at it, and not considered if it is an infrastructure project, a software development project or COTS implementation or – what on earth, they actually want to learn from the testing.

So how do you go about to be in on deals like this? – business context and a seat at the table seems key.

Business Context

First of all you need to be part of a company that cater to this size of deals. The deals I have been involved recently have mostly been about national IT solutions for public and semi-public organisations. The national government rarely have their own IT divisions but hire outsourcing companies to develop new solutions, maintain existing solutions along with hosting and cloud journeys. The more you add into the deal the larger the sums rack up. And similar if it’s a eight year contract for full IT operations, devices/laptops, support and application management services – the deal sum easily ends around the ballpark amount in the headline.

It’s probably different where you live and where you work. You might work on a consumer facing app that is paid pr subscription or perhaps in a team that develop a specific business-to-business product. And that’s cool – context matters. But I know even product houses have to go out and close deals with their business customers ever so often.

A Seat at the Table

Being part of bid and tender teams can be a key role for individual contributors in the staff levels. Staff levels are the senior and principal testing roles – that do not have management responsibilities. The term comes from the book “Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track by Will Larson” and well as from “The Staff Engineer’s Path by Tanya Reilly“. The former book has some excellent chapters on getting a seat at the table and staying relevant there.

While having the role does not guarantee you a seat in the bid teams, neither is a staff role a prerequisite to be in. What matters most is probably management’s willingness to step out and let the experts in on the details. This could also be work that was done by heads of testing and managers of testing. Though as manager you should really focus on servant leadership and let your testing pro’s aid in closing the deal.

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