How to setup a testing process on a large company?

Community Discussion Automation Test
#1

Hi all! I recently started a new job as Head of Test/QA at a pretty large company. I have been working with test management and as test lead for 12 years but never at a company this large.

I am to set up a test/QA process for the entire Digital area of the company. There are some testers here and there but no test managers. Each team work their way. There is lacking communication between teams and lots of project management related issues.

I am very confused how to get this going and how to implement a process for the whole digital. Before in other companies, I have always had speaking partners. That is to say, talking to one manager for the project/scrum managers, one manager for front end devs, one for back end devs, one for UX, one for Ui and so on. Together, we have been working with the testing process. I am used to work closely with devOps and Scrum coaches, to setup the best testing strategy. But there are no such roles at the current company.

How am I to set up a process in this case? There are about 12 different teams within Digital working complete differently with testing, development and QA. How am I to cover how they work and how to come up with processes improvements? It usually takes me +6 months to get into a new team on other work places. 1 year to have a good view exactly on how things is working and setup. I can’t do that with every team at this company.

I have started with very overall research on how testing is done today. Asking the different teams how they work and how they want to work. But it’s a very complex environment and there are no devOps to control the servers/environments so there are tons of issues connected to that. The developers seem very junior in their way of working. And I am no expert in development, so I can’t give them advice how to do it better. But there are looots of bugs and issues. And the dev manager seems annoyed that the code is so bad.

I don’t know where to start.
I lack lots of key roles that I am used to work with.
I could of course invite all the project leads to a meeting, but they won’t have the deep skills in development, UX, etc., that I am after. I need experts to get valid input to a process.

Any ideas how to proceed?
Thanks!

#2

Do those teams have their lead(ers)? Maybe you could sit down with them, for starters, or if they have scrum masters for each team perhaps you could ask to attend the scrum-of-scrums to be up-to-date on what’s going on, on a higher scale without getting too deep into details. Also, if the company has an architects pool you could also get valuable insights from them.

I’m kind of facing similar issues, but on a much smaller scale the developers are very young, and getting them to follow the process is pretty challenging - even though the agreed process is not very strict I still
see stories being created with no or very little acceptance criteria, unclear defects being reported, etc.

It’s a struggle!