What is a QA Lead ?

You may have this role in your company, or you may have a lead on your project or you may have heard about this term and you have no idea what it is or what to expect from it, I think every company is different and sometimes the QA lead is the QA manager or vice-versa and sometimes the QA lead is the most senior member of the team, there are a lot of concepts about this, I'm going to give you my thoughts about this.

When you talk about a QA lead, obviously you have to talk about leadership, someone who can guide other members of the QA team into best practices, coaching, skills, support and advice, the QA lead is the person that must establish the road map within the account or project about QA activities, processes, deliverables and new tools or methodologies to ensure the account or project is meeting client requirements. This person must have great client and personal relationships within the account, he/she is the person to go to in terms of all QA related matters, of course the QA lead needs to coordinate work efforts internally and externally and must execute plans for projects, releases and staff people on the account.

It doesn't stop there, if there are some third party members on the account or project, the QA lead must be the point of contact between them and the team and also train them or at least establish a process for them to work correctly within the team, so to be a QA lead you need a lot of assertive communication and soft skills. The QA lead must be a person that knows what he/she is talking about, that being said, the QA lead must have a lot of knowledge in QA related matters and must have a great understanding of what the client and the account needs and what the project is requesting in terms of quality assurance. From my perspective, one of the most known differences between a QA lead and QA manager or QA director is that the QA lead still needs to perform some testing stuff, and he/she must be awesome on testing matters, at least from my experience.

There are other companies that don't work at an account level, but at project level, so you may have a lot of projects with different clients but not account, in this case there may be a lot of QAs acting as QA leads on every project, this is a normal structure I've seen, every project is different and there are some global methodology or process to follow, the QA lead on each project plans how to apply these processes in the way he/she thinks fits the project needs.

One common mistakes from a lot of companies is to expect a QA lead to be on top of every single QA, in my experience that's micro management and I don't agree with that approach, a QA lead must build the foundation and baseline for every QA to follow and then let them work in the project without being supervised, like a monkey on your back. Only specific cases must have a lot of leverage or supervision from the QA lead and in this case, the QA needing a lot of supervision may not have a good level on QA and may need some guidance.

A QA lead must be on top of new hires, new methodologies, best practices, browser/mobile support, coach other QAs and be the advocate of a good quality assurance process within the company. Complex matters that need to be treated between architects, client, product owners and project managers should be shared and discussed with the QA lead.

@LuchoAgileQA