During every project, test managers face many issues and challenges and often have to make difficult judgement calls. From his thirteen years of experience in testing and management at a large bank and the past seven years as a consultant to test managers, Clive Bates shares the five key areas he believes are the cornerstones for success. Learn how to promote the value of testing, develop and use practical estimation techniques, build your team while working with others in your organization, use simple metrics to monitor testing, and conduct post-project reviews as the foundation for process improvement.

• Key areas for success as a test manager
• Tips for introducing changes in these key areas
• How to make the case for these practices to management and your peers

Business-oriented metrics can bridge the gap between the activities your testing organization perform and the business value your testing produces. Claude Fenner presents real-world examples to motivate and show you how to successfully communicate the strategic value of what you do in your test organization. Learn how the Test Asset Trajectory metric shows testing's fit-to-business demand and whether or not your testing assets are healthy. With the Test Asset Leverage metric, you can better communicate the total cost of ownership and efficiency of your testing assets. Use this information within your own test group to benchmark the current status and map out ways to progress to the next level.

Organizing test artifacts and having an automated process to manage them is critical to the success of test groups in complex application development lifecycles. Managing test cases in MS-Word or a spreadsheet no longer work. From the initial business case for upper management and achieving buy-in within the test team to tool acquisition and implementation, learn how to deploy a structured testing management system in your organization. Vivek Bhatia shares the challenges and his insights from Wells Fargo's successful transition to a structured testing model.

Great test managers wear many hats and must know how to balance the company's demands for returns against the need to build capacity and skills within their team-all without breaking a sweat. Test groups are often under-funded and test managers run themselves ragged trying to be all things to all people. From her many years of contact with both senior management and test managers, Johanna Rothman discusses ways to navigate through typical test management traps, such as: how to effectively move people from area to area or project to project; when to say "No;" when to let a project go; and how to speak to management in language they understand. Johanna offers techniques you can use to succeed at the test management balancing act.