There was an interesting article in the paper the other day which discussed Telus’ leadership development program (or at least one of them). The two year program has participants rotate through four different positions within the company for six months each. There are all sorts of benefits to this for both employer and employee. And when you look at a lot of the large Fortune XXX companies, their leadership all rotated through divisions before taking the helm.

I’ve seen (and advocated) for a rotation strategy with new developers on a team starting with support / test before going to new feature work and then subsequently rotating back into support at a later date. But what about someone on the tester / qa career trajectory? They’re likely not going to go into development.

Here is a 24 or 30 month rotation based on the Telus model I think might help someone with Quality in their title

  • Test – Manual/Computer Assisted – Kinda a no-brainer. This is your classical tester role with focus on manual testing practices or with some computer assistance
  • Test – Automated – A lot of testers can code, but we’re not developers by trade (largely) so perhaps having us write production code isn’t the best idea but test code is another matter entirely. Test automation projects are however real development projects (at least the ones that have a chance of success). To get a better appreciation of the tradeoffs and pressures a developer has to deal with we can simulate that within test while still gaining the benefits of automation. And if you have a new member that has no programming skills, this is a nice sandbox for them to learn in.
  • Customer Support – There is no better way to learn how the application is used in the wild, by real human beings than to actually experience their calls. Not only do you gain product knowledge but you learn to interact with the customer.
  • Product Management – More lessons here about making tradeoffs and decisions. If the role of testers is to find information and report it to management, then we should learn to view the product through their lens.

To a lesser extent, I think Sales and Marketing rotations (maybe 3m instead of 6m) might also be beneficiary.

Once a person has gone through the rotation they will have a nicely rounded view of the business and be ready for the next leap in career growth. This lack of intentional leadership development inside the testing ranks is likely behind the lack of people from Quality backgrounds on management teams (at least that I have visibility into — which admittedly is a small sample set).

Does anyone know of any companies that do this currently? FogCreek does with their software management training program, but anyone else?