I read an article today called Building Credibility: 11 Ways to Show You’re a Professional. The target audience is freelancers, but having credibility is a key issue for testers (and test teams), even if you are full time and not thinking of going independent. (hat tip to James for initially pointing this out to me).

So lets run through them and apply them to testing.

  1. Have an established pricing structure – I might change ‘pricing structure’ to ‘time estimates’. When I was at Points.com I was trying to get my time estimates into reproducible buckets so I could get dragged into a scheduling meeting and have a consistent message.
  2. Create a clean and professional brand – I always try to make the Testing team I am in the most professional one possible. You don’t want any other group in the company second guessing your capability and often those judgment are from what can been seen on the surface.
  3. Pay for a professional telephone service – Not much here except maybe having a central email mailbox which the rest of the organization can contact the test team in a general sense instead of trying to guess the right person to send the inquiry to.
  4. Show Professional Endorsements – In a team context this doesn’t really work, but if any of the team is a member of AST, ASQ or similar, make it known. Especially if they are active in that community.
  5. Proudly display your previous work – Highlight the team’s successes
  6. Proudly display client testimonials and comments – If a customer / client says something great about the Quality of the product, put that up with the previous work
  7. Dress appropriately for client meetings – This is common sense, but don’t forget that you can have internal customers as well. I read somewhere that aiming directly at the level of dress common with the client is not what you should be doing. Instead aim for one notch higher. Seems like good advice.
  8. Always be well-groomed – Again, common sense.
  9. Have lots of detailed information on your website – Wiki; Learn it, Use it, Love it. This is a fantastic place to be putting previous work and client testimonials.
  10. Maintain a confident voice in your industry – Confidence is always important to testers. Or at least the ability to act confident. I have not hired people before based soley on whether or not they would be confident enough to go toe-to-toe with any of the development team. You need to be able to fight advocate for your bugs.
  11. Always be willing to say no – Given our traditional place in the project schedule, all too often we are asked to do the impossible in terms of coverage or speed of delivery. If you say yes then you are setting yourself up for failure and the subsequent loss of credibility in the eyes of the organization. If you say no (and can of course justify it) then you are at least bracing them for the reality that the impossible is not possible when they tell you to do it anyways.

This is a pretty obvious list and I have independently implemented them in one form or another with success, but sometimes the obvious is only that way once it is shown to you.