207: Test Leadership in Agile with Anna Royzman • Test Guild

In this fast-paced world of Agile and continuous testing, the need for test leaders has never been higher. So if you are responsible for creating a testing practice for your company or team–and managing the process and people–this episode is for you. Anna Royzman, founder of A Quality Leadership Institute and creator of the Test Leadership Congress and ConTest, will share some of the critical test leadership skills you’ll need to help lead your team with testing. You’ll discover how to influence your co-workers to adopt successful quality practices, report team progress and foster a “whole team” approach to quality.

About Anna Royzman

Anna Royzman is the founder of A Quality Leadership Institute, the non-profit organization, whose goal is to become the leading advocate for quality in technology through innovative educational programs. A Quality Leadership Institute is developing and supporting such programs as Test Masters Academy, provider of high demanded education in software testing and quality, and Test Management Practices Research by Prof. Robert Sabourin and students of McGill University, and Software Testing and Quality Educator program in association with NYC DOE. Test Masters Academy, a program that is envisioned and managed by Anna directly, organizes annual Test Leadership Congress (in the Spring) and New Testing Conference (in the Fall). Anna serves as the Executive At Large on Association for Software Testing’s Board of Directors. She has been a QA Lead and Manager for 14+ years, served as a president of AST Quality Leader SIG (2012-2014) and as a member of STP Community Advisory Board (2014-2015). Anna is an international conference speaker, organizer, and trainer.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

In 2011 I started speaking at the conference encouraging, influencing testers to learn more of the leadership skills, facilitation skills, mentoring skills because those are becoming really relevant in the modern world of software testing.
So two questions that the testers always have to keep in mind are those we build the right products and we build the product right. Those are two questions that have to keep on asking. Not just others, yourself too. And this is what should be guiding your job your work and the project. Those two questions.
This is actually the focus of my research and my influence on the community. You need several skills. One of those to build the right relationships you really need to come across as a subject matter expert. You don’t need to be a technical subject matter expert but you have to be a system experts meaning you need to understand the whole system and a lot of those questions that I mentioned before — ar ewe building the right product — actually reflects your knowledge of your system and understanding of what your stakeholders needs are.
What is usually happening when the person is moving into leadership with a managerial role. Usually, what happens. You are hired as a test or you start your career as a test, you’re a Hands-On and you acquire different testing skills you become better at that. And at some point, your manager comes to me and say. What’s your next step? And they may give you a group, they may give you a project to lead. And at this point they kind of look at your background right. They are not looking at your future based on your own results they give you some else which requires a different set of skills.
My next conference is called contest NYC. It’s in New York on November 14 to 16 and it’s created for the global testing community. We’re gonna talk about everything testing and what’s hot & new on in testing. And this conference started just last year but it already made it on the list of 30 best conferences in the world. It’s a TechBeacon list of 30 best conferences in the world in that we already made it. So I invite everybody to join this conference. Look for TestMastersAcademy.org that work and you will find all information there.
TestMastersAcademy.org that work on this is my organization where I post all the upcoming events including the conferences. My Slack channel unites the people who are test leaders and managers. And it’s more about peer community that I just started because I run the other conference which is called TestLeadershipCongress and they ran it for three years and every time after the conference people say we want to continue talking. So I developed this slack channel is cool. I will have the invitation on taskmasters Academy. So please join my channel and we’re gonna to start planning more events of the peer Leaders in global testing community to exchange our experiences from each other. I will invite more speakers. There will be more events, discussions, and seminars. Kind of exchanging of experiences and inviting thought leaders from the testing community and from the leadership.

Connect with Anna Royzman

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