Stop Writing Overdone Test Plans

While I have previously talked about writing down expectations and alignments – I would much prefer a more lean and up-to-date approach to test plan documents. Looking at what we know now, an separate test is more of a sign of missing trust between parties than a collaborative value add for the business needs.

A More Advisory Role

Over the last year I have looking to work myself out of the test manager role and into a more advisory role. And by April 2021 I was given the formal title change from Senior Test Manager to Senior Advisory Consultant.

I have had the title “Test manager” probably since 2008, so it’s been a while. In the companies, where I have been employed, the Test manager title has never been with line management (hire/fire). Rather it has been similar to a project manager, with a focus on the testing deliveries of a project, release or program.

I will still be leading test activities, but my role for the future will be more about enabling someone else doing the testing or someone else having a testing problem to solve. There are plenty of test activities done by people in non-testing roles – it’s the activity that matters.

Shift-Deliver, TestOps and ITIL Changes

Shift-Deliver is a label I choose to put on the changes the roles and activities of the TEST MANAGER, when the test manager moves towards (also) being involved in the ITIL change requests, delivery management, configuration management and branch management that happens when the solution goes from the test phase to production. Another label could be “TestOps” as presented here, as the intersection of Testing and Operations. TestOps have been identified for along time. ….Interesting.  🙂

In my IT outsourcing context, this is less about software, and more about solutions. In at least two of my long term enterprise scale projects, half the job was test management (of operations) projects, half the job was regarding ITIL change management. My change management activities was mostly making sure that

• the process was followed
• that information was provided to the stakeholders
• that testing happened
• risk mitigation happened
• …

I was hired as “the quality guy”, but expanded the role over the time I’ve been on the team to take ownership of all of our build and release infrastructure as well. Basically, I’m responsible for everything from the moment code is checked in, until it hits our production servers 

To use a quote by Alan Page. Again Alan is a representative of what happens with regards to trends in testing. He might be wrong, as well as I. I try to label the trends to understand them. These four trends that I have spotted are not mutually exclusive, neither do they all four need directions. Change is happening to the classic test manager rolle of going through the motions of test cases and documents. This is clear when looking into these posts:

• THE END OF THE ROAD FOR TEST MANAGERS? Stephen Janaway 2014

• Test Manager in Agile , Katrina Clokie 2014
• Wither the test manager?  myself 2013

Initially I discussed Shift-Deliver, Shift-Right, Shift-Left and Shift-Coach  at Nordic Testing Days 2016 during the talk “How to Test in IT operations“ and coined the labels on the EuroStar Test Huddle forum.