What qualities and skills one must develop to project himself as a dynamic QA manager or Lead?

Question

I would like to know what skills and qualities one must muster to project himself as a dynamic QA Manager or Lead. I often hear the management in my organization telling me that I don't come up with a road map for the team and this is something that they would like in the person leading the QA team. What exactly is a road map and how to prepare one? What other skills (or habits) need to be developed?

Answer 1

There are some qualities a QA Lead/manager should possess like

• Determining, negotiating and agreeing on in-house quality procedures
• Knowledge of standards and specifications
• Customer requirements
• Investigating and setting standards
• Ensuring processes
• Operating staff
• Writing management and technical reports
• Manage Client
• Analyzing training needs for the team
• Maximize profitability
• Analyzing and distributing statistical information
• Monitoring performance
• Supervising staff

Answer 2

Road map is a kind of simplified project plan. There are some qualities that I believe one should obtain to be successful manager:

• You should always know what you talk about. This makes people trust you.
• You should know what developers talk about. This will let you advocate your qa team deliverables more effectively
• You should see and understand all the factors which impact on your application quality
• You should always look for improvements in your and your team's work
• You should look ahead for several steps. This is what a road map will help you with.
• You should be ready for failures
• You should be ready to justify your failures (in lot of peoples' minds there is an opinion that QA is only responsible for uncaught bugs).
• You should be ready to tell the people unpleasant things (sometimes bad things to the good people)
• You should always be able to explain a complex thing in simple words
• You should always look for the balance between the scope, resources and time.
• You should build the process not to be dependent on an individual. That will reduce the project risks.
• You should look for the balance between your team member goals and project goals.

Answer 3

In my opinion a must-have is being able to see beyond the QA department. Quality manager is not a Quality-testing manager. Quality starts from the inception, up to customer support. A GOOD QA manager must let everyone understand that the quality of the product and the service is everyone's responsibility. Considering testing as the only responsibility of a QA manager is counterproductive. A bug-free product is only part of the solution, and sometimes is not the most important one.