Maryam Umar, Head of QA at Caplin Systems, presented at UKSTAR 2019 in March. 

In her presentation, We are Part of the Team Too, Maryam talked about the three main challenges of leading a QA team:

• Hiring: bad CVs and unmatched salaries form the basis of this argument. The CVs hardly reflect what problems were solved by the individual. Rather, they end up listing all the languages and frameworks without talking about their real application. Another issue is that the salaries of testers don’t match the developers in the industry. This is why a lot of people leave the role and join other sections of the software engineering industry.
• Setting objectives: software development engineers in test (SDETs) should be responsible for overall quality and not just testing their products. Often, SDETs are given objectives that restrict them to testing the product only and not think about the overall picture of efficient product delivery.
• Testers within team: As managers, we also have this constant debate about team ratios. How many testers in the team are enough? What should the balance be? We have created mini-waterfalls inside of our sprints which has eventually started reflecting badly on the testers even though releases are a whole team responsibility.

Watch Maryam's presentation in full here, and read her blog post about the experience of presenting at UKSTAR 2019 here.