There’s a position that has ‘Head’ in it, and so it attracts people so much that they want to be in it. But they might not know what’s typically involved, so let’s talk about it. It’s about the position ‘Head Of Quality’.
The word ‘Head’ gives a booster shot to your ego. It creates the image of you being in the C-suite, everybody nodding at you as you walk the long corridor towards your corner office, people come to you for ‘permissions’ and ‘go/no-go decisions’ for your approval, and you are the ‘blue-eyed entity’ of the customers and clients.
But that orange LED should have blinked in your mind when the head-hunter said you got to be good at Java, JavaScript, and Selenium. You didn’t ask yourself why should you know the languages in detail if you are the Head of Quality? You should just be looking at a colorful dashboard depicting the movement of defects at various stages and be on the hotline with ‘Head of Development’. But, when you really get at it, your day looks totally different from what you perceived.
The position typically translates to everyone downloading everything that’s related to defects on your head. From the Product Owner to development to the customers, everybody looks at you as being the one with the magic wand that would make the defects go away (or with a less effective wand that makes the ‘number’ of defects reduce from version to version.
And mostly, you will be the first person to be hired for ‘Quality’ because the company urgently needs to fix the Quality problem. And so, you got to be on your toes to hire the right automation engineers who will write great scripts to fix Quality. And no, you will not call them as Software Testers because that’s old fashioned. You got to have the magic word ‘Quality’ in the position, so you will call them as ‘Quality Engineers’ or ‘Quality Analysts’.
And then there would be endless nights and weekends you would be staring at excel sheets with gazillion keywords that won’t make sense towards your quest for meaning in Life. You wonder where is Quality in your life. And your instinct is right. It’s not the Quality of you that the company is worried about, but the Quality of the product. And you realize they are different.
And finally one day, you break. Because you don’t care about the ‘Head’ in the title anymore.
So, tell me people, what does contributing to Quality mean to you? To me, it’s everyone’s responsibility and everyone contributes to the end result in different ways. If you are hired to oversee Quality of a product, what are the things that you would do? Comment below.
Feel free to chat with me.