'How do I Encourage my Manager to Support Automated Tests?' codequality qualityassurance
Essentially, when a person encounters information which suggests that their current beliefs are wrong in some way, they feel threatened, which causes them to generate a variety of negative emotions. This is especially likely when the beliefs in question are crucial to their self-concept, which means that they represent an important part of that person’s identity and ideology.
The manager has a "number of features" as a KPI and they push the team to deliver as much as possible as soon as possible with little concern for quality I’d love to go through every one of them but organisational psychology states that the empoyee’s behavior is driven by so many interconnected factors that it’s hard to distinguish which one is dominant clearly.
If you aim to introduce autotest and not to bully your manager or fellow developers, do yourself a favour — sound positive, frame the proposal as smth like ‘see the positive changes we can have if we introduce autotests’, and add some examples.’. Usually it’s used by the managers to provide feedback to the staff, but the psychological effect is universal: we first say ‘good’ things, then ‘things to improve’ and then ‘good things’ again.
This way, we would give the manager something to brag about in their performance review and a tangible difference to back the autotests up in front of upper management.In most companies I worked with managers were promoted from developers, usually good ones. The best of them had such an experience that they could hold the whole program in their head and quickly spot issues, and they assume that everyone is to be the same.
I want to note here that we are not obliged to go this extra mile of course, but if our goal is to introduce autotests, we need to consider psychological issues that might stop us from succeeding.In some companies, there is a separate ‘manual QA’ department where usually the manager ‘growth’ is bound to some KPIs or the number of their subordinates.