Level 5 · Test Manager

Test Manager bootcamp

Strategic leadership, governance, and organisational risk.

Policy, budgets, auditing, and multi-stream programme management.

Start with the intro → Jump to practice

This level covers

Intro Strategy Governance Risk ISTQB CTAL-TM 2024 Strategic Audit

Key Pillars

Governance, policy, budgets, people, and organisational resilience.

Standards

ISTQB CTAL-TM v3.0, ISO/IEC 29119, Privacy Act 2020.

Learning path
01

Read the intro

Role of the Test Manager in modern QE.

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02

Deep-Dive Learning

Strategy, Governance, Risk, People, and Budgets.

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03

Practice Exercises

3 scenarios: Strategic Audit, Budget Crunch, and Incident Post-Mortem.

Go →
04

ISTQB CTAL-TM

Manager-level certification study guide (2024 v3.0).

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Practice exercises

Put your judgement to the test

Exercise 01

Strategic Audit

Audit a Fintech QE function. Identify risks and propose improvements to the quality leadership.

 Exercise 02

Budget Crunch Decision

The CFO cuts your Q3 QA budget by 30% with 6 weeks to release. How do you allocate and what do you cut?

 Exercise 03

Incident Post-Mortem

A production defect reached 45,000 patients. Lead the blameless post-mortem and produce the right output.

 Exercise 04

HealthNZ EHR Migration

47,000 patient records. Three vendors. Clinical safety sign-off. Navigate the governance and get to go-live.
Curriculum modules

The "Lead of Leads" Perspective

Strategy & Policy

Creating the North Star for quality. Aligning testing with business goals.

Estimation & Planning

Defending the timeline. High-Level vs Detailed (WBS/PERT) estimation models.

Environment & Data

Test Data Management (TDM) and Environment segregation (TEM). PII Masking and Synthetic data.

Governance & Audit

Audit-proofing your process. Regulatory compliance and accountability.

Defect Triage & RCA

Governing the triage board, Root Cause Analysis, and Emergency Hotfix strategies.

Financials & Tools

Budgeting for testing, tool ROI, and managing vendor contracts.

Programme Risk

Managing risk at the portfolio level. BCP, DR, and failover strategy.

People & Resourcing

Hiring, coaching, and scaling quality engineering teams. Managing capacity and the 'Who/What/When'.

Stakeholders

Managing expectations from the Dev team to the C-Suite. The art of negotiation and 'Go/No-Go' decisions.

Process Improvement

Using TMMi and DORA metrics to identify and fix bottlenecks.

NZ Government Procurement

AoG panels, GETS, Government Rules of Sourcing, and writing QA scope for RFP responses.

The Business of QA

ROI of automation, business health dashboards, and convincing developers to write unit tests.