A few years ago, I worked myself into a leadership role at my job. Being one of the better Oracle Developers and one of the few that was willing to speak to people in a meeting, I was promoted to Oracle Development Lead. That was pretty ok. I had a great team and, for the most part, they knew what they were doing.
Then, my project got canned, but the contract didn't. Since I was now at a manager-level, I ended up writing PowerPoint presentations for the next year on how to make a massive behemoth of an organization into a more "Agile" massive behemoth. In addition to being massive, they are also underfunded, so progress was slow and highly resisted. I quit that job -- but they asked me to stay. I said I'd had it with PowerPoint presentations and they said they would work me back into the technical work.
Fast forward to now. I'm a Software Testing Lead. I've been bumbling through this job for about a year and I think I'm finally starting to get my feet under me. Rather than trying to figure out what development is up to and come up with some sort of testing schedule which will be messed up two weeks later, I'm going to flip that on its head. We are embedding our testers into the Scrum teams (that's more "true Agile" anyways) and then the Scrum teams can handle the scheduling and tasking. I'm now focused on the aspects that actually take a Senior resource -- test processes and test tools (Arquillian, Rational Functional Tester, Selenium, etc.). I'm going to be helping the teams move towards automation rather than assign it to my resources and hope they'll figure it out. I want to keep them moving forward and making progress in their projects while I spend time on some R&D. I also need to create a set of PowerPoint presentations on testing processes, etc. so that as testing resources become available, they can come up to speed quickly.
Wait, what?
Fair warning -- I'm not really sure what possessed me to post a blog posting today, but it could obviously be years before I post again.
