Transcripted Summary
What does leadership look like in the testing world?
Regardless of your title, it is important to have transferable skills.
As a little reminder, these transferable skills are servanthood, charisma, communication, coaching, decisiveness, respect, and gratitude.
As a test analyst, it is important to have a comprehensive understanding of all aspects of the testing processes in your team.
Therefore, communication and respect play a vital role.
You want to ask a lot of questions, and you also want to respect processes in place.
As a senior tester, it is important to identify risks and establish adequate test coverage, to validate new features and add any needed regression, serve as first point of contact, as well as mentoring some junior testers.
Again, communication plays a vital role as well as gratitude because you're mentoring some junior testers, so it's important to thank them for their work.
For a lead tester, it is important to create and maintain specific or tailored test plans and test cases, including oversight or direct automated scripts. Mainly, support the team to share knowledge as well as mentor or coach team members.
Therefore, charisma plays a vital role. As we know, leading with charisma means leading positively.
For a quality coach, it is important to craft leadership, lead community topics, and support growth and learning.
Therefore, coaching skills play a vital role.
For a test manager, it is important to create and maintain a test strategy for the team, as well as have organizational leadership and help lead the culture of the organization.
Therefore, servanthood and decisiveness are quite important because you want to serve your team, and you also want to make the right decisions for your team.
For a director or head of testing, to become a role model is important by informing and influencing a positive attitude towards excellence, organizational leadership, as well as growing the culture of the organization and impacting the executive decision-making.
Therefore, decisiveness plays a major role, as well as all the other transferable skills.
Great leaders are not the best at everything. They find the best people at different things and get them all on the same team.
The main message of this chapter is, "You don't have to be a manager to be a leader."
