What are the roles and responsibilities of a Test Leader?

• Test leaders tend to be involved in the planning, monitoring, and control of the testing activities and tasks.
• At the outset of the project, test leaders, in collaboration with the other stakeholders, devise the test objectives, organizational test policies, test strategies and test plans.
• They estimate the testing to be done and negotiate with management to acquire the necessary resources.
• They recognize when test automation is appropriate and, if it is, they plan the effort, select the tools, and ensure training of the team.  They may consult with other groups – e.g., programmers – to help them with their testing.
• They lead, guide and monitor the analysis, design, implementation and execution of the test cases, test procedures and test suites.
• They ensure proper configuration management of the testware produced and traceability of the tests to the test basis.
• As test execution comes near, they make sure the test environment is put into place before test execution and managed during test execution.
• They schedule the tests for execution and then they monitor, measure, control and report on the test progress, the product quality status and the test results, adapting the test plan and compensating as needed to adjust to evolving conditions.
• During test execution and as the project winds down, they write summary reports on test status.
• Sometimes test leaders wear different titles, such as test manager or test coordinator. Alternatively, the test leader role may wind up assigned to a project manager, a development manager or a quality assurance manager. Whoever is playing the role, expect them to plan, monitor and control the testing work.

Along with the test leaders testers should also be included from the beginning of the projects, although most of the time the project doesn’t need a full complement of testers until the test execution period. So, now we will see testers responsibilities.