Adapting Test Teams to Organizational Power Structures
Scapegoats, spin-doctors, white knights, and sycophants—have you found your test team playing these roles? Organizations, both large and small, often have distinct cultures and power structures with significant but insidious impact on how individual testers and teams are expected to operate. Sometimes the difference between doing what sponsors and stakeholders request and doing what is really needed becomes blurred. John Hazel helps you learn how to recognize the cultural characteristics of different types of software development teams, and how they drive expectations for the test team. Understand the decision-making dynamics and the perceived value of information across different organizational power structures, and the pitfalls that await unwary test teams. Develop strategies to adapt your team’s approach away from compliance and execution and toward discovery and dialogue. John shares his experiences across a spectrum of power structures, field-tested methods, and tools to help your team tailor their testing practice to add value while maintaining objectivity and impact.
John Hazel leads a multi-site test and support team as part of the network management engineering professional services unit at Nokia. His team provides a full range of QA services—lab design and implementation, manual and automated functional and system verification, delivery, consulting, and training for a suite of custom web applications—that help operators manage mission-critical data networks. John’s diverse experience in telecommunications and IT includes hardware and software development, systems integration, verification, quality assurance, and more. During his thirty year career, John has come to appreciate the challenge of the “wicked problems” inherent in developing test strategies that deliver true value.