Test Management - what makes you good at it?

So you are a test manager and you are not sure whether you are good at it?

Let's think on it. First of all what is it your employer expects you to do - that's quite simple - lead the team of testers and realize some testing strategy (which usually is defined simply: 'find maximum defects possible' or 'assess product overall quality').

So first you better be good with people and disciplined enough to stick to some sensible process of testing (which you can create yourself). If you want to have reasonable process of testing you should approach the task in structured and measurable manner (you need to make sure that you tested everything and you need to be able to provide some interpretation of the results). This is where test strategy, test plan etc come handy. As you proceed into testing you should be generalizing observations, figuring out theories on symptoms, and actively building metrics and measurements which explain in the quantified way software condition.

Next important thing is you better be thick-skinned. You will have to fight with the development team to get software to test on time, developers will not be happy that you found another application crashing input combination, or 'break their deadline' by rejecting the product after simple acceptance testing. Rationally everybody knows that messenger who brings bad news is just a messenger, but nobody likes him anyway. Your goals are somehow opposite to those of development manager (she is supposed to make application work and you are supposed to break the application (yes, yes I know - just to show it was broken in the first place)), so it's easy to get into conflicts. If you have this cool need to pleasure everybody this is not the job for you.

And finally you should be a mega-tester - so the more the hacking attitude the better (after all it takes a lot of skills to act like a monkey at the computer). You will need all features future users of the product would have: non-biased thinking, creativity on how to move against intuition, creative way to stress application etc.

If you have these skills I believe you are on the good way to break many application before they get broken after they leave your shop. Good luck.