Test Management: Practical Lessons for Engineering Team Leads

Source: TesterHome Community

Introduction

The dedicated test management section on TesterHome was initiated by myself. I first proposed the idea to Monkey and later followed up with Hengwen. Though Hengwen was occupied with work and did not respond promptly at that time, the test management community was successfully launched. As the original proposer of this section, I am writing this opening article to share my personal career journey and practical test management experiences for industry practitioners.

The core positioning of test management can be summarized in one word: coordination. Fundamentally, test management is a comprehensive work of overall planning, resource coordination and team delivery optimization.

Based on years of team management experience, I have been constantly reflecting on two core questions in the testing field: What kind of leader do testing team members expect? And as a test management practitioner, how can we effectively lead and manage a testing team?

In the tech industry, many technical engineers move into management roles relying on solid technical capabilities, while many other technical practitioners prefer focusing purely on hands-on work and have no intention of taking management positions. Nevertheless, once an individual serves as a technical leader responsible for end-to-end project delivery, insufficient management capabilities will create huge obstacles for team and project progress.

Therefore, mastering standardized and efficient management methods is essential for technical professionals. It helps resolve practical work problems more efficiently and supports long-term personal and team growth.

During my tenure as a test team manager, my core management goals were clear: improve team delivery efficiency, reduce ineffective overtime, upgrade overall team technical skills, build a positive team atmosphere, enable every team member to achieve capability growth at work, and stimulate active initiative within the team.

1. Technical Capability Building and Targeted Accountability

With rich experience as an automation technology lead, I formulated scientific and reasonable automation KPI indicators for the team based on annual development goals of the team and the entire department.

I organized the team to sort out uncovered testing scenarios and sorted out the required automation technical capabilities for business coverage. All optimization and construction tasks were assigned to individual members with clear phased targets. This personal accountability mechanism brought both moderate pressure and clear growth motivation for the team, enabling members to complete work independently and improve continuously.

In addition to target deployment, I provided continuous technical support for the team. I sorted out and shared professional learning materials, and tackled difficult technical problems together with team members. The overall management logic was to create a growth-oriented working atmosphere where every employee could work under pressure, maintain learning motivation and achieve continuous capability improvement.

2. Standardized Project Planning and Resource Negotiation

Stable and predictable project planning is the foundation of efficient testing delivery. Every month, I communicated deeply with project managers and development managers to clarify the next month’s product R&D arrangement, and formulated detailed monthly test work plans accordingly.

Human resource scheduling is always one of the most challenging parts of test management. In actual project delivery, sudden urgent tasks are inevitable every month. To avoid overall plan collapse and frequent team overtime, I reserved reasonable time buffers in all monthly work plans while ensuring full and reasonable workload arrangement.

Monthly planning and workload arrangement also serves as an important basis for team performance appraisal. In the industry’s conventional project cooperation mode, the testing team is often in a passive position and forced to compress testing cycles, which leads to low team satisfaction and unsatisfactory testing quality.

To solve this pain point, I took the initiative to communicate and negotiate with project and development teams to fight for sufficient testing time and reasonable delivery space. Instead of rigid confrontation, I adopted a flexible communication strategy. By maintaining good cooperative relationships with project managers in daily work, I adjusted release scope or optimized development schedules through private communication, so as to guarantee complete testing cycles.

When emergency tasks arise in the middle of the month, the reserved time buffers can fully cope with sudden demands, effectively avoiding large-scale overtime of the team. Meanwhile, I updated the monthly work plan in real time to ensure that every team member could clearly grasp their daily workload and work objectives.

3. Systematic Team Knowledge Accumulation and Internal Training

Sustained knowledge precipitation is the core driving force for the long-term growth of the testing team. Our department had a mature Knowledge Management (KM) platform. I actively guided all team members to make full use of the platform to complete daily learning and centralized precipitation of technical experience and product business knowledge.

I encouraged team members to write regular work summaries and arranged special product knowledge sorting and summary work after the completion of each testing project. To fully mobilize team enthusiasm, I adopted diversified incentive methods, including verbal praise in regular meetings and material rewards from team public funds for outstanding employees.

In terms of internal team training, I arranged fixed weekly sharing sessions covering technical skill improvement and product business interpretation. Each team member was required to take turns to give special sharing based on their responsible projects. This mechanism effectively exercised team members’ public expression ability and internal training capability, and realized the internal inheritance of team knowledge and experience.

4. QCC Mechanism Implementation to Improve Work Efficiency

To break the bottleneck of repetitive work and low efficiency in testing work, I introduced the Quality Control Circle (QCC) management mechanism to the team. I encouraged every member to put forward personalized process optimization and efficiency improvement suggestions based on actual work pain points.

For effective and feasible improvement suggestions, the proposer would take the lead in forming a small optimization team to develop internal practical tools in spare time, turning innovative ideas into actual productivity and realizing qualitative improvement of team work efficiency. In addition, QCC optimization projects could apply for special department funds, bringing dual benefits of process optimization and team honor.

As the instructor of team QCC projects, I tracked the progress of all optimization projects in real time and provided targeted technical guidance to help the team complete tool development and process iteration.

In practical testing work, mastering VBA development skills can greatly improve the efficiency of processing various test forms. Meanwhile, customized tools for log analysis, test script generation and other scenarios can be independently developed according to team business demands, which effectively reduces a large number of repetitive manual operations.

5. Humanized Management and Team Cohesion Building

I have always adhered to a people-oriented management philosophy. The performance achievements and rewards obtained by managers are inseparable from the hard work of every team member. Therefore, I always insisted on investing more in team building to reward the team’s efforts.

Limited corporate activity funds often cannot meet the needs of high-quality team building. For this reason, I would take the initiative to supplement the expenses personally to ensure team members can participate in high-quality and satisfying team activities. Premium group dining experiences, such as Haidilao Hot Pot, can bring better team atmosphere and emotional connection than ordinary casual restaurants.

In view of the hobby characteristics of young team members, I also organized weekend DOTA game gatherings regularly. In addition, casual home dinners with colleagues were another important way to narrow team distance and enhance internal cohesion.

Conclusion

The above content is a summary of my personal practical experience in test management over the years. I hope to provide valuable reference and inspiration for peers in the industry through this sharing.

Some industry insiders may be able to identify the companies involved in my work experience. I sincerely hope readers can focus on the practical management experience and skills shared in this article, rather than irrelevant extended discussions.