Back here I talked a bit about who I think should comprise a test team. The following is a bit more of a discussion about the segregation of duties within the team.

Broadly speaking, there are 3 roles that you can do working in a test team. They are Manager, Lead and Tester. Each of these have a set of expectations around the work they will be doing and some very ball-parky time allocations.

Tester

  • 75% – Day-to-day testing
  • 20% – Flushing out automated frameworks with new tests
  • 5% – Creation of test artifacts (test cases, plans)

Lead

  • 35% – Day-to-day testing (enough to keep up-to-speed on the products so they can fill-in during a staffing crisis)
  • 15% – Creation of testing frameworks
  • 30% – Running defense for the team / Removing roadblocks
  • 10% – Strategic work (new bug system, etc)
  • 10% – Process improvement

Manager

  • 90% – See Lead
  • 5% – Budgetary oversight
  • 5% – Directly responsible for all of the team’s employment activities (hiring, firing, promotion, salaries, etc)

Obviously the times happen in different sized chunks, for instance the lead might spend 4 solid days writing a framework one week, but nothing the next 2 weeks. I think the numbers feel about right though. Given this work definition, it is important to staff appropriately. If you have a Lead doing 98% testing, you are wasting their knowledge about likely causing them to rethink whether they are getting what they want out of the role.

Disclaimer: This above post is a result of my not being able to actually do the team-lead stuff I am supposed to, and if I sound annoyed, it’s because I am.