Testing Manager - Create a service culture

Project teams develop software in order to provide benefits to customers. The customers might be in-house or external, paying or nonpaying. The customers might be the same people as the developers.

Testers provide services to the overall project. A typical service is finding and reporting bugs. Other services depend on your group's mission.

One of the fundamental issues running through the testing literature and the testing subculture is whether your role is primarily service or control:

• A service provider controls the quailty and relevance of the services he provides to the larger effort to develop the end result. We provide excellent services to people who need them.
• A service provider does not control the quality of the end product, does not control the processes used by other service providers (programmers, writers, marketers), and does not approve or deny approval of the release provides services to the project manager.