"Now What Do I Do?"

I'm been thinking of taking this blog in a slightly different direction. The motivation for this change came from the question that is the title of this post.

A couple of years ago, a good friend of mine, a product manager, called me up on a Sunday night asking for help. His software startup company had been growing quickly, as had the number of bugs in its product. They needed to implement a formal testing process, put together a QE team, and build automated tests. And fast. Unfortunately, no one at the startup had ever done this before. My friend was brave enough to say, "hey, I know someone who could help." So - he was placed in charge of the task. I wrote up a couple of pages of ideas for him so that he could get started.

I've thought often of his question as other people have also asked me about how to set up a QE team from scratch. One of them was also at a startup, a couple of others were working on new projects at larger companies, while another had just been promoted, with no advance notice, to manage a non-existent QE team. What they all had in common is that they had to build a new team, find or develop tools, and define a testing process, all while they were also trying to meet an aggressive product release schedule. Sort of like building a bus while it roars down a highway.

Anyway, what I'm going to try to do in the next series of posts to this blog is to answer that question. I'm hoping that this series of posts will be a useful roadmap or reference guide. The scale of the posts will probably be longer than most blog posts, but I'm going to keep the combined total length of the posts shorter than a book. After all, if you're in a situation similar to one my friend found himself, you don't have a lot of time to read!