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

Health NZ 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.