Putting Together a Testing Team

Which roles should a testing team include?

A testing team needs defined roles as well as seniority levels. The ISTQB Advanced Level syllabi name four of them: test analyst, technical test analyst, test automation engineer, and test manager. A fifth syllabus covers the agile tester. The current versions are CTAL-TA v4.0, CTAL-TAE v2.0, CTAL-TM v3.0, and CTAL-AT v2.0. You do not have to certify anyone to use that split. It is a published skills map, so it works for writing job descriptions and for deciding which gap the next hire should fill.

Role and level are separate axes. A senior test analyst can be a beginner at automation, and a capable automation engineer may never have written a test strategy. Track both. On a team of five or six, one person usually holds two or three roles, which works as long as it is written down. When nobody owns the automation framework or the test data, the work still gets done, but it gets done differently each time and no one is accountable for the result.

AI adds two separate skill tracks here, and they are not interchangeable. Certified Tester AI Testing (CT-AI) version 2.0 covers testing AI-based systems, and its syllabus includes input data testing, model testing, and machine learning development testing. Certified Tester Testing with Generative AI (CT-GenAI), at syllabus version 1.1, covers the opposite direction: prompt engineering for testing, the risks of using generative AI inside the testing process, and LLM-powered testing solutions. It lists the Foundation Level certificate as a prerequisite. Decide which of the two your product needs before you fund a course. A team testing a machine learning model needs the first. A team that wants help designing and maintaining tests needs the second.

Key Takeaway: A testing team should track role and seniority as separate axes, and write down who owns each of the four ISTQB roles of test analyst, technical test analyst, test automation engineer, and test manager, even when one person on a small team holds two or three of them.

Motivation, passion, and determination

Do you know what motivates each of your employees? As a leader, you must develop this skill. A team's success is determined by each individual member as well as how well they work together. Understanding what motivates your employees is the first step toward a fruitful individual development endeavor. When you question self-aware individuals about their motivations, they will tell you things like, "Retire before 50," "More time with my family," or "No more eighty-hour workweeks." Direct observation is beneficial for people who are less self-aware. Testing, in my experience, draws more "I'm not sure what I want to do" people than those with a testing career objective. Only one out of every ten testers I know has a real desire to further their careers as testers. The majority of them are quite pleased to work forty hours, go home, and forget. You can try to force professional development on them, and some of it will stick, but is it the best way to spend your limited time?

This is why, during interviews, it is necessary to explore for critical thinkers with drive and excitement. They want to know, so when they don't, they spend a lot of time and effort attempting to figure it out. How do you inspire such people? I have four examples of conventional incentive strategies and one unusual one that was accidentally displayed. This is not a five-step program; they are independent strategies that may be adapted to specific needs.

First, I usually encourage people to enhance an existing ability or acquire a new one. Second, I delegate particular duties. It's not about the expertise here; it's about completing a task in a unique way that allows people to do something they wouldn't ordinarily try. Third, I'll assign them a complicated topic. Fourth, I strive to offer them freedom, which may be scary. Many individuals can't deal with independence unless they trust you as a leader, and autonomy might imply success or failure. The final tactic I found when I left my previous work is to create a vacuum. Someone I had been trying to get to step up and be a leader eventually did so, but only after I had departed and there was a leadership void.

My ideal technique is for one of my employees to initiate the process by asking, "What areas can I improve in?" or by initiating their own development. These are generally the folks that provide the greatest return on investment. They've already completed step one: admitting they don't know everything. This is the group of folks to whom you may casually remark, "Hey, I was thinking about x. It appears to have promise "and they will begin investigating, examining, and attempting to see how they might employ it.

Unfortunately, most of the time, the process is led by the management. When a tester does not recognize that he is ready to progress, you must be direct: "I believe you have potential. Would you be interested in discussing how you can take it to the next level? What do you want to achieve in the next two to three years? Would you like me to assist you in developing a learning strategy?"

It is critical to match a candidate with a mentor who has a similar personality. People who match are easy to coach, but people who clash can occasionally work, but only with a lot of effort on both sides. I was attempting to assist someone in learning her next steps, so we sat down to go over an agenda I had prepared for what we would cover in the following session. I assumed she'd simply pick it up and we'd both return to work. But after fifteen minutes, she was on the edge of tears, and I was so irritated with myself for not being able to articulate the notion that we never worked effectively together again.

Key Takeaway: Motivating testers works one person at a time through tactics such as building a new skill, delegating a specific duty, assigning a complicated problem, or granting autonomy, and a tester learns fastest from a mentor whose personality matches their own.

How does AI change what a testing team hires for?

AI changes the work a testing team does, not the levels it is built from. You still hire juniors, middles, and seniors, and you still develop each level differently. What changes is that a large share of first-draft test code now arrives from an assistant, so the team spends more of its time judging tests than typing them.

The tool vendors say as much themselves. GitHub documents that Copilot code review may not identify all of the problems present in code, that it carries a risk of hallucination and can flag problems that do not exist, and that generated code may look valid without being semantically or syntactically correct. GitHub tells teams to supplement it with careful human code review. Read that as a hiring statement. The assistant raises the volume of test code, and it raises the value of the person who can tell a correct assertion from one that merely passes.

Two skills follow. The first is prompt and context work, which is what the Certified Tester Testing with Generative AI syllabus covers alongside hallucinations, reasoning errors, and data privacy risk. The second is testing the AI features in your own product, which is a separate discipline with its own syllabus. Put the first on your middles and seniors as part of normal delivery. Fund the second only when you actually ship a model.

Key Takeaway: AI does not change the junior, middle, and senior structure of a testing team, but it moves the team effort from writing tests to reviewing generated ones, a job GitHub itself says still needs careful human review.

Conclusion

While forming a team of ten testers is substantially different from establishing a team of forty, assisting each tester in his career progression is essentially the same. You must be aware of the various levels of testers in the team, the competencies of each level of testers, and what motivates each person. Equally significantly, you must be able to recognize when a tester at any level is ready to start gaining the skills and mindset required to advance, and you must give the mentorship necessary to help her get there.