On a project nowadays, you may have forty to sixty temporary testers, after which maybe two or three are brought on as full-time testers.  In a department of forty to sixty full-time testers, you may have maybe five leads that cycle between products or ten leads that vacillate between leads and individual contributors.  Finally, you’ve usually only got a single QA Manager, although some organizations are splitting it up so that there is a manager per fifty testers or so.

In short, you have a major funnel from temp to tester to lead to manager and if any level is filled, your opportunities for advancement are severely restricted.

The question is…why should the funnel exist?  There are many ways that organizations can allow testers to grow without forcing them through the funnel.  These are a few of the possible ways that your organization can allow growth within QA without “breaking” the funnel.

Specialization: As time goes on, testers often find that they excel at testing a certain type of feature.  It may be console certification testing, it may be localization/globalization testing, it may be multiplayer testing, it may be UI automation…the point is that this person has shown that they excel at it.  If the workload allows it, it may benefit all projects to have a person be a specialized tester.  Another advantage of specialization is that if your testers are allowed direct access to your development team, the tester and developer of certain features are going to be interacting more often and the communication channels between these individuals will be a lot smoother, resulting in more bugs found and fixed.

Tiers: In many companies, there are only four levels a person can be: temp, tester, lead and manager.  This makes it very difficult for someone to advance, but you can also have sublevels or tiers within these levels.  After all, not every tester can or should be a lead, but that’s no reason to minimize their chances for career advancement.  Some companies have recognized this and have a “V” type system at each level where a tester can go be a lead, or become a Senior Tester or a mentor or something else.  It means an increased amount of responsibility and a structured career path.  People can choose to grow into their current tier or try to advance to the next tier without having to worry about being “managed up or managed out.”

Split Positions: Not everyone goes into QA to stay in QA.  Often, people go into QA as a stepping stone into other positions.  QA Managers can work with other departments to try to allow their testers who want to migrate to other departments to essentially let them “intern” in other departments for 2-3 days a week, usually interning Monday and Tuesday and test the remainder of the week.  In exchange, the other departments absorb the costs for those days.  This way, the employee gets a chance to grow, the departments get cheap labor and the QA manager still gets a tester without having to fund the entire position.

What other ways do your companies allow testers to grow when they hit a tier ceiling?

1. Hire observant testers, and then see that they are well trained on not only the platforms that they are going to be working on, but also on other platforms.  Knowledge of platform strengths and weaknesses can help an observant testers hypothesize where errors will be located.  Also have them test your competitor’s games.  Find the errors that they made and let slip through so you won’t have the same problems in your games.

2. Be sure that your testers have all of the equipment and testing tools that they need, and that they know how to use those tools.  Every platform has a wide array of testing tools available.  Your PC testers need to know how to use Process Explorer and Process Monitor at a minimum.  Both Microsoft and Sony provide a large range of testing tools for their platforms, although the documentation leaves a lot to be desired.  Learn them yourself and then train your testers on their use.

3. Help them plan their work to make the most effective use of their time.  As a lead, you should know about the architecture of the program and should be able to help them ensure that not only are they testing the entire feature, but that they are minimizing their efforts at retesting portions that have already been tested either by themselves or others during that test pass.  As a manager, you should be able to pick up on patterns in how a tester works that could be inefficient or scattershot and help them improve their testing abilities.

4. Stay in close touch with every tester.  Know what each one is doing.  Work with them.  Because testing is such a high turnover profession, we have very little in the realm of legacy knowledge.  Work with them not only to pass on the knowledge that you have, but to harvest the knowledge that they have gleaned themselves so that if they leave you can pass it on to the next generation of tester.

5. Keep up their enthusiasm.  Encourage every tester every day.  Very few jobs are harder on the psyche than being the bearer of bad news.  Not only that, but testers work long hours for little pay and often have little chance of career advancement or permanence.  It’s hard to keep them motivated, but recognizing accomplishments can go a long way.  Calling out when someone tracks down a difficult severity 1 bug, noticing when someone passes a major bug milestone on a project, celebrating team bug milestones, all of these are simple, effective ways of maintaining morale in a department that isn’t usually known for it.

But please, if you want to keep their morale up, don’t show them “Manos: The Hands of Fate.”