Hiring the right people to build a strong team is an important responsibility of any management role. While making a hire, besides looking for specific skills needed for the role, Test Managers must examine if the new member’s skills would complement the team’s existing skills as well as personality types.

A good team has variety of technical skills and personalities, so that it can handle projects with different complexities and interact with other teams successfully.

Software testing is highly stressful and full of demanding activity throughout the software testing life cycle, usually due to tight software development timelines and unreasonable expectations by stakeholders.

• Test Manager must hire team members who are able to work in high pressure environment, not get frustrated and perform even within seemingly impossible deadlines.
• Though the Test Manager is supposed to directly handle these issues of scheduling and stakeholder expectations, practically it does get transferred to members of the team too.
• When the Test Manager is hiring new team members, personality type of the new hire must match with the work environment.

For example, if less time is allocated for every work than what’s needed, Test Manager must have achievers in the team, who are always willing to complete the current task and move to the next one without any problem.

People tend to work more and take more responsibilities when they feel they are valued and others need them. Test Manager should work towards creating an environment where each team member feels that he/she is important and their contribution is essential for team’s success.

• In such an environment, cross-training and work balancing is carried out by members of the team, freeing up the Test Manager to handle the external issues.
• The new hires must be absorbed in the team immediately, given a specific role, trained adequately and supported whenever needed.
• The role and training required can be decided after the individual’s skill assessment is done.
• The aim should be to ensure that besides enhancing personal skills the new team member should contribute to the team constructively.
• This can be done by assigning roles that suit the personality type and not just technical skills.

Objective assessment of a potential hire is essential to decide if the person is suitable for the role or the team. The assessment can be accomplished through interviews, real-time testing, reviews of prior work samples, as well as reference verification.

Evaluating a candidate’s technical skills

Let us now look at some of the skills that must be evaluated.

These are some of the ways in which the candidate’s technical skills may be evaluated:

• Creating test cases on the basis of requirements
• Review of technical documents like program code, requirement specifications etc .
• Giving objective and clear reviews
• Applying appropriate technique for a given testing scenario
• Evaluating and documenting a failure
• Knowledge about defect classification
• Expertise in root cause analysis of detected defects
• Performing both positive and negative tests for the given API
• Finding information in a database using SQL and modifying it for testing a specific scenario
• Performing test execution and failure troubleshooting
• Creating testing specifications and test plans
• Creating test summary containing test assessment, for a testing report

Desirable soft skills in a candidate

These are some of the desirable soft skills in a candidate:

• Presenting information about a delayed testing project
• Explaining any defect report that is not acceptable to the developer
• Training a team member
• Convincing the management about an ineffective process
• Reviewing and commenting on a test scenario developed by a team member
• Team interviews
• Praising a developer

These lists are by no means complete. They only list the most desirable skills in a new hire. The actual requirement will be different for each project environment or organization.

Test Manager should develop incisive interview question and permit skill demonstration to evaluate a candidate and judge the strengths and weaknesses. The evaluation framework must be applied to current team members to find out their training needs and areas of growth.

Besides the team members, Test Managers should also have excellent communication skills and be highly diplomatic. They should prevent contentious issues from escalating, employ suitable communication medium and concentrate on creating and nurturing relationships inside the company.

In the next topic, we examine how Test Managers can manage testing team at different levels of independence.

Other popular articles:

• How to assess, manage & develop skills in testers as a Test Manager?
• What are Distributed, Outsourced and Insourced Testing?
• What is Whole-Team Approach in Agile methodology?
• What is the Role and Skills of a Tester in Agile Methodology?
• How to manage Non-Functional Testing?