Test Management Principles

I keep six honest serving men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who. Rudyard Kipling

Here are some principles acquired, like most painful experiences, when I was trying to do something else.
• If you can’t plan or process model it, what makes you think you can do it?• Never put into a plan what you can put into a strategy document. Only put the unchanging essentials into the strategy document. Any part of the plan which doesn’t somehow depend on the strategy document is probably not thought through properly. Any part of the strategy document which isn’t reflected somehow in the plan is a risk.• As soon as you have finished the plan, go through it and see what you can cut out.
• Limit the things you monitor to the phase you are in, the start of the next phase, and the top priority alerts.• Anyone should be free to raise a bug. If bugs are duplicated the test manager can weed out duplicates daily at the bug clearing meeting.• You must have access to all bugs reported from the field.
• You are paying test staff primarily for their ability to think. If they cannot or will not do this, then sack them.• Testers need to work with the best. It’s part of your job to keep the idiots out.
• Pay your staff the compliment of reviewing at least a sample of their tests. If you can’t be bothered why should they?• Testers can concentrate on details: you must be able to both take an overview,and to
concentrate on details.• Testers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing: you must know both.
• If your processes are wrong you’ll be forever fighting them.
• The more your processes are tool-based the fewer documents you’ll need: you only write a document because there’s no tool capable of holding the information.
• If no one really needs a document it won’t be read. A document is there to remind you, to tell you how to do something, to tell someone else something or to help you think. If it doesn’t, don’t write it.
• Do not accept the unacceptable. Even if your customers do. Because someday they won’t. Try and be somewhere else when that happens.