I have a QA team report directly to me, their day to day tasks are:
- Correct the new specifications together with tech leads/PM
- Write test plan
- Discuss with teammates during implementation phases
- Review automated test from teammates
- Workflow stuff, analyze bug reports etc..
- Automation test when they have free time
Each team have 1 QA, 5-10 devs, they're not "Tester" so counting bugs are not mean for them. In my point of view, my QA team doing a lot, there is no debate about that among team members.
But then a high level manager asks me: What is the QA team doing? We're refactoring team structure (honestly we didn't deliver as expected) I realized:
- It's normal to ask that, they're not technical and don't work directly on the ground.
- Different with others developers, QA don't have many Jira tickets under their names. Their git commits also can't compare.
- Don't like PM, they don't speak to high level manager that much (only the lead QA - and not really often).
My actions:
- write daily stand-up so we have work logs (report a Jira issue for all spec mistakes is too overkill I think)
- discuss on public group only (no slack private group)
- peer review from team members
What's else should I do/stop to make theirs communication tasks more visible?
(Task like discuss, review specs, classifying/prioritize bugs)
PS: Of course I can just explain to them, but it's not data-driven. If one day I leave or lost trust from my manager this won't work.
Also it's unfair to the team. I don't need to write a daily report.
The only difference is they don't work directly with high level manager.