As usual, nice thoughts. Always loved the way you approach a problem. Very nice article. Hope management wakes up after reading this post!!!

Most of the managers feel insecure when they don’t see you piling up the TC’s in your test management tool. They simply use it like a dust bin. They don’t know it won’t works. I have seen this happen many a times. They even mention about this in meetings and AHM’s too, like one of their team came up with N number of test cases/per month/per resources and because of such an extensive scripting they found X number of defects (As per them X is a large number):-(. May be team would have done better than that instead of wasting time in so much of detailed scripting which won’t serve any one for better (Because no one is going to go and see the TC’s once they get sign off from the required person). Most managers think that exploratory testing is not measurable and cannot comeup with so called ‘METRICS’:-(. Many in the organizations need education on many issues I believe. They need to understand how things work before they manage the work.

I have a very best example against the scripted and too much planning in testing.

I was one of the participants in STC 2009 which was held in Hotel Le meridian, Bangalore. After all the sessions, we had some entertainment programs and networking sessions in the evening. Le meridian management had decided that one person will be serving the drinks, but that counter was so much crowd that he couldn’t serve everyone efficiently. He couldn’t even know who Michael is, where you were waiting to get your drinks What happened next was that, they got to close the counter. I was very next to you and you said “Hhaa, for this vast crowd only one fellow is serving the drinks. Can’t management see this?”

This is how the management is, most of the times. They preplan and go with that, without thinking much or without making changes when required. They want to script everything and every time. If management was well versed with context driven approach, then they would have come up with the best service with little change, in the above example. Most of the management has a single plan for many different adversaries, problems and they come up with these problem predictions before they know anything about the product under the test.

Hope, management learns and respect what better testers do!!! Hope they will not count number of TC’s written, executed and the number of defects they log…

Cheers,
Vijay…

Still, there are some concerns:
What about middle-managers that aren't supposed to manage so much, just make sure the orders are executed.
This thinking doesn't work if it is thought that managers are 'better' than testers.

Maybe we need to sell trust before we can sell excellent testing?

What about a counter-example (maybe drifting off-track):

Micro-Management
This is the obsessive involvement and imposition of an additional layer of control into the unit/org where all (many small) decisions go via the manager. It's not good for self-organising (self-driving) teams and can skew the smooth-running of the team.

Mmm, is this the example of a tester wanting to pre-specify every result and outcome of a test before it's executed – down to minute detail…???