People lose control and act impulsively all time. It is important to forgive ’em. If you never act impulsively then you seem humorless, uptight, officious, bureaucratic. When professionals act impulsively we wonder: should let this guy steer the ship? One scheme to temper impulses is to smooth things a bit using a group. When your managerial team act out impulsively it’s a signal to go short.
Here is an example that is kind of meta.
“I have a friend who works in a small company who have just put the three testers on notice of redundancy. The developers have been told that they will have to do all the testing. The testers have been told they have five days to write a letter justifying why they should be kept.
I need as many reasons possible why getting rid of the testers is a bad idea in a scrum environment please.”
The managers in question probably should have run that idea thru a bit of quality assurance.
Boy is that bad personal management, totally unprofessional. It’s going to be impossible to get much enthusiasm for the job going forward. I’d file that under “examples of trying to control behavior by raising the stakes.”
Whenever you do layoffs the remaining staff is soured. Dissipating the emotional cloud that falls over the team critical. It is really hard. The people laid off are the most susceptible. That is one reason firms try to get them out of the building as quickly as possible. That bum’s rush is another example of what the public health guys call social distancing, and the tactic outlined above just about assures maximal infection.
It also signals that management lacks much clue about the role of QA, or that things are much worse than they are saying.
I can’t help thinking that these poor testers have been invited to write their own obituary. It could be like one of those scenes in a comedy of bad behavior where the lawyer reads the will that going on for pages as the deceased enumerates each and every flaw of his descendants. But yeah, here’s a impulsive suggestion: Once they are gone, who will fill the role of canary for their code miners?
As falls Quality Assurance, so falls profits. The two are linked because it turns out that people prefer software without bugs, hard as that might be to imagine.
The big companies I’ve worked for get that – they always have a nearly one-to-one ratio of designers to testers. Maybe that is why they are big companies.