What a great few days, as I write this I am sitting in the Gold Coast airport terminal waiting to board the airplane home. It's just a bit nostalgic, as the first blog post I wrote on the way home from the Test Managers Forum in 2009. The theme of that post was testing and aeroplanes (come fly with me!). As was commented by one of my colleagues today - my posts are sometimes a bit random, but always related to testing, somehow. I expect that this post isn't going to be any different ;-)
I've been lucky enough to spent the last two and a bit days with a room full Test Managers from some of Australia's biggest and most reputable organisations. The Test Managers forum brings together like minded testing professionals to discuss, debate and deliberate on a wide range of issues facing us in our everyday activities. The hot themes this year involved resourcing, testing environments and requirements; it seemed no matter the size of the organisation we all suffer in the same ways. The good news, is the collective wisdom of all those present at the forum were able to shed some light as some of the ways we might be able to cope, over come and prosper when faced with these challenges. Of particular note for me were the discussions on tester Certification and tightly coupled issue of Testing as a profession. Equally I stretched my grey matter when thinking about resources, recruiting, retaining and training.
I've previously blogged about changing the focus and emphasis of the certification process; moving towards a system of professional recognition and on going development; much like many of the other professions (life savers, swimming instructors and engineers). It seems that my views are shared by the wider testing community that were represented by the delegates at TMF. Though we didn't resolve to change the world - we collectively agreed to raising the bar …. or did we? With representatives from ANZTB, CSTP and the ACS on the panel discussion centred around certification being the 'entry' or the start of the learning process, and that there is no substitute for real life experience. However, for those of us that have been testing on the front line for some time now, and who are certified testers the discussion centred around external recognition of our skills. And this is the point for many of us, the certification might not open the door to a new job but may be the differentiator that gets us the job over someone else who is equally capable but is un-certified. There was talk about organisations becoming certified, which looks like it will happen but is at this point a ways off being a reality. The benefit to the organisation is creditability, it may not mean that you are ganuteed to get a better result but as the argument was elegantly put "If one of your mates has a drivers license, and one doesn't who are you going to ask to drive you to the shops?" Well that should be a no brainer! I personally believe the certification has its place in our industry, and will assist us to gain the recognition we aspire too.
The topics of recruiting, resourcing and retaining is tightly coupled to the discussion of Certification, as to get certified one should attend training. However the focus of my thoughts out of this discussion centred around the salaries that testers are demanding/commanding. As a person who's been in charge of hiring and firing for some time now I had some views on it. My general principals when hiring is that salary should be closely aligned to the skill set and role that the person is to perform. Nothing new there. For ease of discussion, I'll start with contract rates; I would generally pay a contractors $1 for every $1000 of the equivalent pay point of a permeant officer. So within the government space, if you were a contractor performing a Test Analyst role equivalent to an APS5, and an APS5 received a salary of $55,000 per annum then $55 per hour was about the mark. I found that this system worked pretty well, and party because we had a good description of what each of the members within our team would be doing, and an outlines of what level they would be expected to operate for a particular APS level. But I was thinking whilst at the forum about the other end of the spectrum which was discussed around our table, that in some organisations an APS5 might be a test lead/team leader and many of the people simply won't apply for a job at that level with those skills because it doesn't pay enough. This is not a new problem, but I thought of a new (I think) way to tackle the organisational 'we don't get paid enough' situation - Warning - This theory has yet to be tested and therefore may have some errors in logic or bugs in it… During the conference we looked at a case study about the cost of defects which slip through all the testing and get into production (on average 10% of defects are detected in production RossReport2010). In the example that was presented the cost to the organisation to 'fix' the defects in production, not accounting for the opportunity cost or loss of revenue was roughly $9000 per defect. $9k is a pretty sizeable number and it got me thinking - if you had to fix 6 defects in production in a year, that equates to $54,000 - do you see were I am going with this? What if, in simple terms you worked out that one more tester in the team would be enough extra resource to find those pesky 6 defects before production? Then that would make for a compelling business case, and in fact might be 'cost neutral' or better. So applying the same logic to a team that is struggling to attract resources because the pay scales are not comparable with the rest of the industry in the area, might try using a similar business case, but instead looking at defects holistically across the SDLC. We all know defects are cheaper to fix earlier, so let's say a defect during test costs $1,000 to fix then for every defect detected and fixed before production there is a saving of $8,000 so if we found 100 that's $800,000 saved. So that value of testing to the organisation could be expressed in terms of (cost of testing - savings delivered by testing) = some amount. You would then have a value conversation with the powers that be, saying that if we were paid just a little better, we'd attract a better class of tester, thereby increasing the quality of our testing in turn delivering greater value to the business and not increasing the actual costs to the business. It's worth a shot, but it has to be a value conversation not just a "we need better rates conversation…"
