1. My Life As A Practice Manager

2. So what is a practice manager?

3. What’s a practice manager?
“manager of a business” - Collins English Dictionary
“...involves decisions, actions and resource allocation to enable the provision of professional services to meet the objectives of the organization” - The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners

4. What’s a practice manager?
“the individual responsible for the overall testing effort of a department”
test

5. I’m not a practice manager
Manager of Testing

6. What is my role?

7. Officially...
“The Manager of Testing is responsible for guiding the overall test strategy of the QA dept. This role is also responsible for working with the other teams within the QA department to help them architect and execute better tests, and for designing, creating and teaching testing techniques to the testers within ”

8. Educate people on testing
I say it’s to...
Educate people on testing

9. I say it’s to...
Promote new ideas

10. I say it’s to...
Improve our testing

11. I say it’s to...
Promote (our) testing

12. My situation

17. Loves putting out fires
Our VP
Loves putting out fires

18. New hires
Adding 40+ a year

19. Little to no testing experience
New hires
Little to no testing experience

20. Change averse
If it ain’t broke...

21. Training
New(ish) program

22. Ridiculously understaffed
Training
Ridiculously understaffed

26. Decisions made for me

27. Manage QA Education

28. Task Forces

29. Customer Engagement

30. Automation

31. Making my own decisions

32. Internal training
Promoted QA Ed
Change it

33. Games lunches
Every 2 weeks

34. Improving tester roles
Job Families

35. Conferences
Took over the “budget”
Promoted attendance

36. Conferences Attendees 2013 - 3 2014 - 9 2015 - 13 2016 - 11(already)
Speakers
(me)
(I was 4)
(I was 2)

37. Testing Talks

38. Rapid Software Testing
Brought in help
Rapid Software Testing
Paul Holland

39. Intro to Exploratory Testing
Brought in help
Intro to Exploratory Testing
Matt Heusser & Pete Walen

40. Lean Software Testing + Automation
Brought in help
Lean Software Testing + Automation
Matt Heusser & Jim Holmes

41. Local test community
Meetup

42. Local test community
NOSQAA

43. Having a title
Sounding Board

44. Areas of improvement

45. Going it alone

46. Expecting change to be easy

47. Expecting change to be fast

48. Asking permission

49. What I want for the department

50. Stop testing everything
Trying to
Stop testing everything

51. Documentation expectations

52. Non-production bugs

53. Test environment

54. Pairing

55. Charters & Sessions

56. But we don’t have
time to change

57. Change outdated,
non-QA Ed Training

58. Get testers in the code

59. What I want for myself

60. Respected resource

61. Trust & confidence
to direct our testing

62. Educate customers

63. Automation

64. So, let’s talk