Evaluating workers, skills Vs traits

How do we evaluate our employees? We know the traits we value in employees, but which traits are more important and which are less? Through gut feeling we may feel that trait A is more important than trait B, but how does each of them translate into day to day performance?

In this post I will discuss a rather cool method we have developed for determining which traits are the most important for an employee to posses, how to evaluate employees and more. The first steps are rather obvious, but starting from the third step it's getting rather cool. Trust me.

Some time ago, I had a conversation with one of my Team Leaders, regarding the needed skills and traits for a QFO (QA Feature Owner). We made a list of the traits we valued the most and wrote them on a whiteboard but then the calender reared its ugly head and we were forced to stop and vowed to resume the session "soon".

"Soon" turned out to be some six months later. When we met again, were no longer two people in the room but six, as I asked other leads from my team and two HR to join the party. After a long discussion we decided that our way for evaluating our employees will consist on the following phases:

1. At first we decided what are the needed skills the QFOs needed. The skills we decided our QFOs need are:

• Task planning
• Task duration assessment
• Synching other interfaces
• Reporting
• Following up on features
• Context switching
• Task prioritization
• Problem solving
• Specification document analysis
• Writing organized test documents
• Effective test coverage
• Good test prioritization
• Bug hunter
• Organized bugs
• Through bug analysis
• Bug prioritization
• Etc' (this post is not about the skills required to be a good QFO)

2. After we were happy with the skills needed, we set about writing down the traits we thought good QFOs should posses. The list we came up with was something like this:

• Fire and forget
• Broad vision
• Self driven
• Self improving
• Passionate about the product
• passionate about QA
• Technical skills
• Organized and thorough
• Businesslike (practical, focuses on getting things done instead of ego games)
• Critical thinker
• Creative
• 
  

So now we have two lists, skills and traits. Now we put them in an excel table, with traits being columns and skills being rows:


3. And now the cool stuff begins. In the next phase we marked each box in which a trait and a skill intersected. For example, Task Planning requires a QFO to have a Fire and forget attitude, posses a Broad Vision of the team's goals and be Self Driven. So we marked those intersection boxes with 1's. Self Improving, on the other hand, is not especially important for Task Planning so we left that box empty. We proceeded to fill the table until it looked something like this:


4. In the next phase, we summed (in the last row) the number time each trait was used:



Looking at the last row, we see that the three most important traits for a QFO in our organization are being Organized and Thorough, possessing a Broad Vision regarding the company's goals and being a Critical Thinker. We know that they are important because they affect the largest amount of skills we defined as important for a QFO's daily work.

Next post I'll do more fine tuning and show how to use this method for evaluating employees and giving them more effective feedback.

QA Feature owner - when testers become project managers II

We have been using QA Feature Owner (QFO) methodology for two months now so I guess it's time for me to review where this is going. My vision is very clear to me:

• I (QA manager/Team Leader) don't want to decide what will be tested in each build

• I want to increase testers' commitment and familiarity with "their" features
• I want each tester to be skilled in all three testing methodologies we employ (Greybox/Integration tests, UI automation tests and manual tests) as well as with core QA methodologies and skills such as reading a specification document, analyzing it, deriving risks etc'

If that wasn't clear enough, I'll now emphasize what team I don't want:

• I don't want a team in which I have to decide which test will run in each new build. Too many test cases and too many changes in each build for me to do this effectively.
• I don't want a team of domain experts who only test their area of expertise. I don't want the UI automation expert doing nothing but recording scripts and I don't want the person who is used to testing manually treat automation like black magic.
• I don't want testers who test features when they assigned to them and forget them after the testing is done. I don't want tester who move from feature to feature.
• I also don't want tester who got job security because they are the only ones who can "do this thing". This is not exactly QFO related so I'll deal with the versatility issue in another post.

Since we started using the QFO methodology, we are testing differently. When we get a new build I sit with each QFO, asking her what she wants to test and why. Why is this test left out? Why do we run that test again? While I'm there to supervise, each QFO is responsible for creating "test runs" (that's how a collection of tests is called in Testopia, our testing suite) for new and existing features. QFOs run some of the tests themselves, other tests they delegate to other team members. That's OK, that's how the system works.

This system is obviously not suited for every testing team. Team members need to be able to (and want to!) take responsibility over their features. Team members need to delegate tasks to other team members and perform testing tasks which aren't "theirs" so good communication skills are also required. It is geared towards responsible testers who want to be involved with the product and not just perform tests assigned to them by some authority figure.

QA Feature owner - when testers become project managers

In our R&D organization, new features are usually led by developers. While managing the new feature, the leading developer is assigned the title Feature Owner for that feature. She delegates some work to other developers while performing some coding tasks personally. The larger the feature, more time is spent on managing and coordinating efforts and in smaller ones the FO spends more time coding. The interesting issue (for me) is the interaction with the testing team.

Most features are multi tiered: there's a backend layer, some application layer and a UI. Tests for each layer are different, of course: Greybox testing for backend layer, SQL scripts for database related tests, UI Automation and manual tests for the UI, etc'. The problem is, most testers don't feel equally comfortable with each testing methodology so what tester do I sign for each feature? If I assign a manual tester to a "mostly UI" feature does it mean we want test the backend? My coder can't handle the UI automation suite, maybe I'll just skip automatic UI test?

The other alternative is assigning several testers for each feature, based on their skills. This ensures that each tester is assigned tasks she's good at but it also poses other problems:

• The overhead of testers learning new features is now multiplied by number of testers involved in testing the feature
• Dispatching work between the testers and writing a test plan can not be done by the development FO, as she does not have the testing know how. Also, who is to know all the bugs related to the feature? Each assigned tester? Too messy and getting a quality overview is hard.
  
• Why not assign the QA team leader for dispatching tasks and writing a test plan? Because most of the time she will not do the actual testing on the feature, so we have a paradox: the QA person who studied the feature and designed the tests does not test it and the people who test it did not study it thoroughly (overhead, remember?)

The solution we are practicing now in my testing team is assigning a QA Feature Owner (QFO) to the development Feature Owner (FO). The assigned QFO is usually the person who's skills are the most relevant to the feature, but she needn't posses all the required testing skills: the QFO will assign tasks to other testers in the team in areas in which she lacks or simply does not have time to run or design tests.

This is how it works: upon reading the spec, the QFO designs a test plan, a document detailing the general testing strategy. In this document risks are identified and then tests are written as a sketch: a few words describing the general purpose of each test. We find it convenient to start by designing Greybox (GB) tests, then Automatic UI tests (AUI) and finally manual tests.

It doesn't matter if the QFO is a programmer or not when designing GB tests. Using Data Driven Testing methodologies most GB test cases are list of methods and what they are supposed to do and attached CSV files which are no more than input/output files based on the original spec. AUI tests are simply stories in English ("go here, click there") which can also be augmented beforehand using CSV files. Test cases are later reviewed by other team members to validate their testing logic and enrich the tests in areas in which the QFO is weaker. For example, a manual tester can review the manual tests written by a QFO who has strong programming background and suggest additional tests. Test cases will later be examined by the FO and QFO together, in order to ensure full coverage.

Once all test cases are approved by the QFO and feature and test coding begins, the QFO starts following the testing project. The QFO is responsible for ensuring that tests are run but not necessarily by the QFO personally: testing tasks can be assigned to other testers as long as the QFO remains the testing team's focal point for the feature. The QFO does not need to be the one reporting all defects but must know all defects opened which are relevant to her feature. The QFO is responsible for the testing of the feature but the actual tests may be performed by others.

We have started implementing this methodology only a few weeks ago and it remains to be seen whether we benefit from it on the long run. I don't take the fact that we're asking hands-on testers to become project managers for granted and believe some will adapt to it better than others. Others will resent the time spent in meetings and reporting and will feel more at home getting their hands dirty with testing. I have no intention of forcing any tester to become a QFO, I consider it a perk, not a requirement. I do, however, believe that tester assuming the role of QFO will enjoy the challenge of managing a testing project, interacting with more team members from the R&D than they are used to and experience new testing methodologies. I believe a good QFO is a potential testing leader.