Some reporting is part of the job. If nobody knows what has been tested, what is failing or what the release risk looks like, the test manager is not helping by refusing to update anything.
But if the role has become a full-time exercise in collecting percentages, colouring boxes and explaining why this week’s amber is a slightly more encouraging amber than last week’s, something has gone wrong. We can review the reporting and the function around it if you want.
Reports should drive decisions
A useful test report tells people something they need to act on. A major journey is still failing. Performance is unproven. The environment has invalidated half the results. A supplier dependency has not been exercised. Those are decisions waiting to happen.
A useless report says 1,842 tests executed, 93.7% passed, 14 defects open and status amber. It may be accurate. It may also tell a senior decision-maker almost nothing.
Find out what the manager is no longer doing
Test management should include shaping the approach, removing blockers, challenging weak coverage, making sure the right environments and data exist, helping teams prioritise, developing testers and turning evidence into a clear view of risk. Ask instead whether the work produces a useful management test report; that is a better test of the reporting workload.
If all of that has been crowded out by governance packs, the organisation may have designed the role badly rather than hired the wrong person. Some programmes demand so much reporting that a test manager needs a small production line simply to describe the testing nobody has time to improve.
Kill reports nobody uses
Ask who reads each report and what decision it supports. If nobody can answer, stop producing it for a month and see who complains. This is not scientific, but it is surprisingly effective.
Do not replace ten bad reports with one giant “single source of truth” dashboard containing every metric known to Jira. Reduce the reporting until important information becomes easier to see.
Check whether reporting has become the product
You can usually tell when governance has eaten the function because the report starts driving the work. Tests are scheduled to improve dashboard percentages. Defects are closed before meetings. Status definitions are discussed more than the underlying risks.
The report should be a description of reality, not something reality is rearranged to satisfy. If people are changing testing behaviour primarily to make the pack look healthier, cut the pack back until it can no longer run the programme.
If you want us to review your test reporting, the manager’s workload and whether senior people are getting useful assurance, get onto us. We can usually tell fairly quickly whether you have a test management problem or a reporting-industrial-complex problem.