Lead Tester Mastery

Advancing from a tester to the role of Lead Tester is a great step. It means that you have proven your worth as a tester and now are being entrusted with well-being of an entire project. You are also being asked to develop the team that will work with you.

For some, this is a stepping stone to becoming a Quality Assurance Manager for others, becoming a Lead Tester is like coming home. Either way, it is exciting to be faced with new opportunities and new challenges. This also means that you’ll be making more money – and that’s always fun!

But as exciting as becoming a lead tester can be, you may find the duties and responsibilities overwhelming. It can be a very daunting task indeed to develop yourself into a professional lead, but it is well worth it.

As an experienced, professional lead you will be more in demand, able to command greater pay and benefits, and have many more opportunities available to you. It doesn’t happen overnight, but if you learn the lessons below you will be well equipped and on your way to becoming a highly sought after asset.

10 Skills for Lead Tester Mastery

There is no one right way to manage, but you need to know what your way is. If you are going to manage your own projects successfully, you need to know what works best for you. To maximize your success, you should stay with your strengths. But before you can do that, you better know what your strengths as a manager are.

What is your leadership style?
Just as important as how you manage is how you lead. Your project needs managing (and so do you people to a lesser or greater extent), but your people need to be lead.

I believe that leaders are made, not born. There are so many different ways to be a great leader – you need to find yours. If you can lead your people, managing your projects will be easier. In fact, if you can’t lead your team there is every likelihood that your project is doomed. Why? Well, why should your team perform for you if you are a thankless taskmaster? If you just punch the clock and bitch at them, chances are they will run from you the first chance they get. They may work your project once, but they will find greener pastures as soon as they can.

How do you inspire the trust necessary for people to want to work for you? Are you the Rah-Rah type; giving “win one for the gipper” speeches? Do you have daily stand-up meetings with the team and short sit-downs with each member individually to listen to them? Do you bribe them with donuts, soda, chocolate, beer, lunches, etc.?

However you do it, be sure to be genuine. If you are not yourself, they will catch on. But if you can be true to who you are while genuinely trying to lead your team, they will at least respect your effort.

What skills do you have?
What set of skills and abilities do you bring to the game? Each of your team members will have their own unique set (and you must know them), but just as important is what do you know? Why are you the QA Lead?

Are you thoroughly schooled in the technical skills needed for your project? Are you an automation whiz that has been assigned to teach the junior techs the best way to approach your product?

What weaknesses do you have?
Identify the areas of managing, of skills, of expertise, etc. that you do not have or are weak in. What about being a QA lead tester do you find most difficult? Discover what you don’t do very well (chances are you don’t like doing whatever it is) and be very clear about it.

Once you have identified where you are lacking, then you are in a position to take action to rectify these weaknesses. If you cannot admit where you need help, then you will become the weak link on your team. As a Lead Tester you need to be the strength of your team, not its Achilles heel.

You will want to find members of your team who excel in those areas. Let those team members help you with their ability to excel where you don’t.


2. Building a team – 101:
To be a Lead Tester, you must be able to build a team. Whether that means you get to select your team members or merely mold what you are given into a cohesive unit, if you want to excel as a Lead Tester…learn to build a team that you can lead.

Know your people
First things first. If you want to build a team, you need to know what you have to work with. Who are the members of your team? Identify each of their strengths. Learn each of their weaknesses. You should know who works well with others and who is better off working on their own. You need to know who likes you to check in with them often and who works better if they only need to give you a status once a day or once per week. Learn the members of your team and you can begin building.

Put them in position to succeed individually
Help yourself and your team by positioning each member of your team where they have the greatest chance of success. As a Lead Tester, if you position your individual team members so that they will succeed, you will have gone a long way in setting your project up for success.

If you position your people to succeed, they will be happier team members. They will gain momentum each time they accomplish a task – the tasks that you have assigned them. This momentum will build throughout the course of the project. If you have positioned your team members properly, each challenge they overcome will strengthen the ability to do whatever you ask.

Take the time to position your people properly. You will be happy you did as your job becomes easier and the project advances.

Position your project to succeed
By positioning your people to succeed, you have taken the first step in ensuring your project’s success. But this is only the first step. You must also take steps to position your project to succeed.

One way to do this is to manage expectations. As your team members go about succeeding in their assigned tasks, it is up to you as the Lead Tester to manage the expectations others have of your team. It is one of your tasks as Lead Tester to ensure that sanity prevails as you begin to progress through your project. If you see a schedule that is simply not realistic, make sure you alert the right people. If are not receiving deliverables on time, make noise about it. Your team will be working hard for you so you need to make sure that they are provided a fair chance to succeed.

By ensuring that the whole project team is constantly aware of the state of the project, you allow them the opportunity to make corrections. As a Lead Tester, you will always have the critical data in front of you to inform the project team whether the project is on schedule or not (or you will if you follow my lessons). You will know if the metrics you are tracking are moving in the right direction to maintain the schedule or not – no one else will have all of this information in front of them.

You must lead
If you know your personnel, have place them in optimum positions for individual (as well as team) success, and know the milestones your project must achieve…then you are ready. You have laid the groundwork necessary to get the project off to a great start…now it’s time to do your job.
What is your job? You must lead. You are a Lead Tester; not an associate tester, not a codependent tester…A Lead Tester. Your job is to lead.

As John Quincy Adams, the 6th US president is quoted:

Know your people
As I said earlier – you have to know each member of your team. You need to know their strengths, their weaknesses, their optimum working environment, how to communicate with them, etc. If you know your people, then you can not only build your team but develop it into a stronger, more capable unit.

Improvement is only possible if you are able to lead your people. And to lead your people, you must know them. You can try a “one-size-fits-all” approach if you like (many do), but you will be relegated to mediocrity, status quo, and less that happy employees. None of those things appeals to me. If you want to become one of the best, you must know your people as individuals as well as a whole team.

Lead your people
Lead – it’s a verb! This is something that you do – every single day. You go and you lead. You are the Lead Tester – this is your gig. The team is your team – they are yours to lead and to protect. You must be active. You should be pro-active. You are the one that the team will look to for guidance, the one they depend on for protection. You are the Lead Tester – so Lead.

It is your job as Lead Tester to make sure that everyone is on the same page, moving toward the same mutual goals, and supporting each other as they achieve their respective individual goals. To really lead your team, your people must understand the language you are speaking and they have to buy what you are selling. If you can accomplish this, then you and your team can accomplish anything.

Develop their strengths
As a leader, one of the highest return activities you can undertake is that of developing the people that work for you. Since you have identified each of your team member’s strengths and weaknesses (and if you haven’t, make a point to go and do that as soon as possible), you should have a good idea of what areas to develop help them develop.

What areas should you develop? In my experience, you, your team members, and your team as a whole will get the best return if you investment in each members area(s) of strength. Yes, each team member should develop basic competencies as necessary, but if you want your people to truly excel, you should help them develop their strengths.

By knowing the strengths of each of your team members and discovering what they are excited to learn you have the perfect map. You will create a roadmap to an achievable goal with each of your team members. The goal must be a balance between what they want to learn and an area of their greatest strength.

Sometimes these elements are in perfect alignment and all you have to do is establish an agreement about how you will support your charge. Other times these elements have a great variance – this is where your leadership will shine. You will find common ground between what they want to learn, an area of great strength, and a way in which this development will support your team.

Develop your team’s individual strengths and your team will become stronger. Use your leadership abilities to mesh those strengths so that they support one another and you will create a juggernaut. And a very happy one at that.

Go to strengths in crunch time
A Lead Tester must know when the time for skill development has passed – and the time for muscle building is at hand. During the course of your project, you help your team members develop their skills – but when time is short, the deadline looms, and you have been (despite your greatest efforts) backed up against the wall, that is crunch time.

When crunch time comes, you main goal should be to get up and over that hurdle. Clear the challenge and get back to developing your people’s skills. When you find yourself in such a pressure packed scenario, you need to reprioritize. Place a hold on developing your team’s skills and instead focus on building their muscles.

In crunch time you go to your strengths. This means that you should position your team members (repositioning, if necessary) so that each member is working in their area of greatest strength and skill. Their focus should be on speed and accuracy – on clearing the challenge in the shortest possible time. Since your team is working to its strengths, they should be able to excel in this challenge.

As the Lead Tester, you have determined that this is the not the time for skill development, but that doesn’t mean that all development should stop. This is a prime opportunity for your team to flex the muscles they have been developing. Now they should do what they do best and do it better and faster than before – you, as the lead, make sure that this is their focus.

In the early stages of team development, you will probably have a much more hand-on role during crunch time. You poke and prod, cheer and guide, correct and challenge your team – all to make sure they are focused on the right things and are doing them in the right way.

As your team develops into a mature, cohesive unit, your role will be much more that of support. Your team will know what to do – and you butting in will only slow them down. Although this can be a difficult transition, reaching this level of team coordination will mean that you can take on greater and more difficult tasks without changing your effort level. At this stage, your role as Lead Tester will be to shield your team from outside noise.

You must make sure they have the tools they need, the space they need, and any other support that they request. They will tell you what you need to know before you need to know it (although you may still get nervous) because you have worked and trained together to build a system and a team that strives to be the best.

Develop your team members strengths…you won’t regret it.

4. Building Processes and Systems
To make your testing meaningful, you must be able to accurately measure and replicate it. If you want to this to be possible without costing you’re a room full of mainframes and an army of CPAs, you will need Processes and Systems.

Everything must be replicable
For Quality Assurance testing to truly be useful, it must be replicable. Everything must be replicable. If it is not, then you have no baseline from which to test; no standard against which to compare. To create this baseline and establish these standards, you need processes that you can reproduce. Once you have those, you will need systems to track the results, create the reports, measure the metrics, and provide you the useful data that will allow you to define ever better processes and systems.

In some companies, these Processes and Systems are already in place. Most of the time though, even companies that have instituted these have only very rudimentary versions. Because of this, you as a Lead Tester have a prime opportunity to create a better world for your team. You can implement Processes that help your team accurately reproduce their testing and define systems to help them measure and report their results.

You can find several resources throughout this site on the subject of build processes and systems. For now, I will just cover the basics. Your Processes and Systems need to be able to track what you will do, what you have done, and what happened. They need to allow you to gather the results and make sense of them. It’s just that basic. Yet most companies don’t even have these beginning elements in place.

Processes and Systems must be simple
Your Processes and Systems should be simple. If they are not, then you will make your job and those of your team that much harder. Implement simple systems that make your workday easier by relieving you of the burden of having to remember everything. Start small and grow. Find what works for you and what doesn’t. Start with: “Here is the plan of what we will do”…then add: “This is what we did”…then add: “These are the results of what we did”. And always keep it simple…

Once you have begun to implement your Processes and Systems, it is key that you get your team to by in to what you are doing. Make sure that they understand why you are using these Processes and Systems. They need to know why they are using these tools and they must know how to use them. When your team understands what the Systems are and how and why to use the Processes, they can begin to help you evaluate them.

Test your implementation
You cannot blindly implement a Process and leave it at that. You have to see how it stands up to actual use and make modifications as necessary. You may need to make some adjustments because of the demands on your team. You make need to modify your Systems to allow your team members to more quickly gather pertinent data. Start with a plan so that you can adjust it as necessary.

When your team has an understanding of your Processes and Systems, your next step will be to ensure that you begin to build in efficiencies. How? By making sure you team members know that any and all Processes are subject to review. They must know that all Systems are candidates for modification. You people will use the Processes and Systems and then will begin to see ways that they can be improved. Your role a Lead Tester will be to make sure you receive this feedback from your team and implement the improvements that warrant it.

Your team and the tools that they use will both become stronger if you follow this path. Remember: All Processes and Systems are always subject to improvement. Make sure your team knows this.


5. Tracking Project Progress
In order to know where you are in your project, you will need to establish a system for tracking progress. You should have begun this installing the pieces in the step above. Here you have a chance to practice on a specific example.

The most important element here is that whatever you use must be functional. I really don’t care how you set it up (ok, I do…but I’m trying to make a point) – the system you put in place has to provide you the information you need accurately, quickly, and easily. It must be able to track data accurately, with minimal maintenance from anyone on your team. It should be accessible at the drop of a hat. And it must be easy enough that anyone on your team can access the data you need without any trouble (otherwise you will never have time to do anything else).

Your functional system will be able to tell you at a moment’s notice the status of your project. You should be able to accurately speak to the following (potential) subjects:
*How far along your project is
*How close you are to achieving a given milestone
*How many test cases (or test suites) have been completed
*How many test cases (or test suites) remain until the project will be complete
*How long a single round of testing takes
*How many rounds of testing will be necessary to complete the project
*How many testing hours (and thus $$) it will cost to achieve each project milestone
*Whether the bug count is increasing or decreasing, detailed by each area/module
*The rate at which bugs are being closed
*Etc…by now you should be getting the general idea

There are many ways to set these systems up. You could use the total number of planned test cases as the baseline and track your percentage of completion (completed 35 test cases of a planned 100 = 35% complete). You could break it down by defining the parameters of a single testing pass – how long it will take and how many cases will be run – then multiply by the number of complete passes you will have to execute. However you set it up, keep these key items in mind:
*Keep it simple
*Define what you will do (the plan)
*Track what you do (measure)
*Quantify what you did (report)
*And Keep it simple

6. Handling Multiple Projects
If you really want to impress the people you work for, learn to handle multiple projects with ease. When you can run 3 separate teams each testing a different project, you will truly have blossomed into an effective Lead Tester!

First things first
Let’s start at the beginning. Before you find yourself trying to juggle multiple projects, set up your systems first. Practice developing, setting up, and optimizing the systems you will use when you are running ONE project. Practice them and perfect them. Learn them, know them, and know how to scale and modify them as needed. With your processes, procedures and systems refined and ready for use anytime, you have the tools that will help you keep track of every important detail as your projects get thrown into chaos by less conscientious souls.

When you are the Lead Tester for multiple projects, you should be able to juggle your testers for maximum benefit. What I mean is that your teams, although they may be separate, must be cross-functional. They should be flexible and skilled enough to slide from project to project, supporting each other as the need arises.

You may have the good fortune to never have a project slip off of its schedule. If that is the case, then you may never need to alter the makeup of your test teams. But if you work as a Lead Tester in the real world, then you need to develop the ability to know which of your team members to shuffle, where to shuffle them, when to shuffle them, and when to let them slide back into their original role.

As they do this, you must remember to acknowledge the flexibility they offer you, the help they provide to your projects, and the skills they bring to your team. Reward your people for stepping up and getting the job done. Appreciate them openly – this costs you nothing and is crucial in building a real team.

Know your roll
The biggest handicap most Lead Testers bring to the party (other than lacking useful systems) is that they do not understand their role when handling projects. The more projects you have, the more pronounced this handicap becomes. The fix (in 3 words or less): Know your roll.

That’s it – that’s half the battle. Know the role you need to play to make the project(s) succeed. As I wrote above, with a young team that is finding itself and developing chemistry, your role is that of the motivator, the cajoler, the guide, the teacher, the leader-by-example. As your team matures, you become more the provider and protector, the ever-watchful mentor that will make sure your team has everything it needs to get the job done.

Leading multiple teams
When you are leading multiple teams, this becomes even more crucial. You must really be able to lead. You must keep your teams on track and working together toward their individual and mutual goals. As the teams multiply, it becomes ever more important for you to trust the teams you have built, the systems you have put in place, and the results that they provide. Provide for your team and know your role - Lead Tester, that's you.

What your role is NOT:
Becoming the bottleneck. If everything has to go through you, your team can only move as fast as you can. Again, as your teams multiply the more chance you have to become the logjam. Avoid this at all costs!


7. Bugbase Maintenance
This is an area that far too many Lead Testers avoid. Your bugbase can be a great tool, and invaluable ally, and the keeper of truth for your projects. But if you don’t take proper care of it and don’t remain vigilant in doing so, then it will become a confused morass of data that will be anything but helpful. When your bugbase falls into disarray, it reflects on you as the Lead Tester. Keep it clean and you will keep it simple.

So how do you keep on top of a bugbase that has hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of bugs in it? How do you control what is being entered and how it is being used? I am so glad you asked! Let’s start at the beginning.

The user's guide
The first thing you will need is a user’s guide. Now, this document is not to take the place of any Help file that comes with your bugbase. It is not meant to be a tell-all how-to for the many features that your bugbase undoubtedly has. Your goal with this user’s guide is to provide templates and define proper (read: acceptable to you) use of your bugbase.

You don’t have to ram this guide down everyone’s throat. The point here is to have a reference guide that you can pass on to anyone that is not 100% clear on how to correctly use the bugbase. Non-QA team members may ask for this guide, or they may be using the bugbase incorrectly. Either way you, as Lead Tester, will have a ready-made answer any time you need it. You will also have a quick training guide for any new QA team members that you bring on board.

This guide should provide a template for how to enter a bug. It should guide the user in the use of assigning bugs, commenting bugs, regressing bugs, changing a bug’s status, what to do when they find a bug in any one of several different states – the guide should allow any team member to take the right action on any bug at any time. Build it now, you won’t be sorry.

Regular maintenance
With proper bugbase policies and procedures outlined, your team and everyone else should be using the bugbase without issue. But in the real world, people still sometimes make mistakes (some people more than others). It is up to you to keep these mistakes from multiplying.

Remember, your bugbase is only a useful tool to the extent that you can quickly and easily extract information from it. The more inaccurate data in your bugbase, the more skewed your results will be. You will not be able to speak definitively and with integrity about the state of the project – not without spending several man (or woman)-hours gathering data by hand and sorting through all the mistakes. Save yourself the time and headache by making the necessary minor corrections each day.

Each day? Yes. Each and every day you, as Lead Tester, should be in your bugbase making sure it is as up to date and clean as possible. Start this habit as soon as possible. As soon as your project is underway, you should be in your bugbase every day performing this maintenance.

Look at each new bug entered. Hopefully it matches your bug template, but even if it doesn’t it still may be a valid entry.
*Does it have all the information that it should have?
*Does it contain any misleading or superfluous statements or data?
*Is it assigned to the right party?
*Does it have an appropriate severity and/or priority?

Make any corrections you believe are warranted. Ping the person who entered it with any challenges you have regarding their selection of priority, severity, etc. Assign it back to the person who entered it if it needs more information or needs any other sort of overhaul.

Review bugs that are updated each day. Make sure that they contain appropriate information for any change that has been made. Validate that whatever changes or updates have been made are helping to move the bug along and not relegate it to a location where it will never be touched again. If the bug is no longer relevant, get rid of it. Keep your projects moving forward more effectively and efficiently by keeping your bugs as up to date as possible.

Review, each day, every bug that gets closed. Make sure that they are all commented properly and that they should actually be closed (this will also help you stay as current as possible on the state of the project even without spending all day testing). If you find a bug is closed but there is not comment explaining why, don’t assume someone took a shortcut or just forgot. It is just as likely that closing that bug was unintentional.

If you find a bug that is closed for no apparent reason, reopen it and immediately go have a little chat with whoever is closing bugs without giving a reason. This helps prevent unfixed issues from falling through the cracks. If a bug is closed, your team should be the ones that did it. That means that you, as their Lead Tester are responsible. If a bug is closed but shouldn’t have been – you will be the one that gets blamed.

Keep your tools clean
Make sure your bugbase remains a useful tool for you. If you take the time to maintain your bugbase, you will be able to mine from it whatever data you need whenever you need it. Get in the habit of checking all new, updated, and closed bugs each day and making all the necessary corrections – or making sure those that made the mistakes make the corrections. A sloppy bugbase is just about as useful to a project as having no bugbase at all. Maintain your bugbase and your job will be much easier.


8. Robust Reporting
To show off the value of all that you and your team accomplish, you need to deliver reports. This should be more than just “We did some tests and it looks pretty good”. As a Lead Tester, what you need to do is incorporate your reporting into all of the Processes and Systems that you create. Here are the simple keys to creating reports that will impress your audience.

Use templates. Templates?!? Yes, templates. When you create a report, you should be focusing on the great content you are delivering, not worrying about the format. You need to worry about how to clearly impress your audience, not trying to figure out how often to send a report or who to send it to. Templates help with this.

A template should guide you (and your team) when creating your report. It should tell you what information you are to provide, where to provide it, and to whom you should send it. That way your job as report writer is:
*Go get the information from the source(s) as directed by the template
*Enter the information where the template shows you to
*Review your communication and edit for impact (the only thing not completely spelled out by your template – although it could be)
*Send to the predefined list of recipients

Create templates for each type of report you need to send. Make them simple to use. Build them so that everyone on your team can use them as well as you. This produces consistency in your reporting (or at least the perception of it). That will make people trust your reports – not question their validity because every report coming from your team looks and feels different.

In order to make the templates easily useable by you and your team, they should be Systems based. That means that there is a process in place that lets everyone know what reports should be sent, to whom, how often, and what information they should contain. Because you are using templates, you can define what data you will track, where it will be stored, and when you will use it.

Have your entire team work with this system. When they do, they will be more able to concentrate on better and quicker testing – not trying to remember who to assign bugs to, or what font to use in their reports, what metrics they should be tracking, or who gets which reports.

When building your report templates, remember that you will want different reports to meet different needs. It might be easiest to think of it from the bottom up. What information does the frontline tester need to be able to communicate up the chain? What information will you need to summarize from them into your reports? What information will need to be passed all the way to the top ranks of your organization?

Keep those questions in mind as you develop your report templates and you will start right. Continue to refine those questions as you practice with your reports and you will develop ever more useful templates.
*Keep it within your system
*Keep it simple


9. Mentoring
A fundamental aspect of being a leader is your ability to mentor your charges. As a Lead Tester you have to make a decision about how important this is to you. Your company may compensate you financially for developing your testers, you might find this an opportunity to practice mentoring, or you may simply like me and can’t help yourself.

Here are some guidelines that I began working with when I became a Lead Tester. These are what I found most effective and I continue them to this day. Keep it simple and always looking to improve…

One-on-One meetings
Set and keep weekly one-on-one meetings with anyone (and everyone) that reports directly to you. At these meetings you have the opportunity to set, clarify, and track non-project goals. This is your chance to really hear what is on the minds of each of your team members. As a Lead Tester, this is one of the most effective ways to keep your finger on the pulse of your team.

Make the time to listen to your team. This is their time; their chance to vent, question, theorize, or talk with you, their Lead Tester, about whatever they need to. This is your opportunity to set goals with each of them to help them develop in areas that they desire.

You can review their progress each week, continue to set goals, and work toward an agreed achievement. You can help keep your team motivated by helping them become more marketable, more skilled, more experienced, and improve their overall professional value.

Daily check-ins
Beyond your weekly meetings with each of your team members, as the Lead Tester, you should check in every day. You don’t have to make a big production out of it. Just be the Lead Tester.

Encourage your team. Point out ways that they can tweak their skills to improve. Motivate them, talk with them, find out if anything is impeding their testing, and listen to any improvements they have come up with for the team’s systems.

Check in every day. It’s free (or at least cheap). It’s simple. It shows that you are part of the team. And it shows that you care – professionally, if not personally. You are the team’s Lead Tester. Your behavior sets the tone. You must lead.


10. Raising the Bar
Everything else that I have detailed for Lead Tester Mastery involve specific actions you should take. Before I wrap up this overview, I want to highlight that more than just actions are required to achieve mastery. The most important element you can bring to the table as a Lead Tester has nothing at all with any specific action. To be a great Lead Tester, to be one of the best, you must have the attitude. How do I define this intangible asset that makes great Lead Testers great?

Integrity
They embody integrity. This is Quality Assurance we are talking about. Your main job, no matter what your position in QA is to protect the integrity of the brand. You can only do this if you have integrity. As a Lead Tester, if you don’t show the integrity to protect your client, your company, and the consumer…why should your testers.

Process
To assure quality means more than to run a few tests. Quality is a process – a process that requires diligence, vigilance, and…integrity.

Chamption
They champion the quality standard. They understand that quality is measured by the end-user, not the creator. Thus they set an objective and measurable level of acceptable quality – and they champion holding to that standard.

No Compromise
They facilitate, they add value, they assist, they provide…but they do not compromise when it comes to quality. They understand that to be great, they and their teams must perform to a level that they define themselves. Great Lead Testers aim for the highest level – always raising the bar.

Teach and Mentor
They not only implement Processes and Systems that enable their team to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively, great Lead Testers teach. They teach how to develop processes and systems. They teach how to ask the right questions. They teach how to communicate more effectively. They are real mentors to their team members and they place a premium on making sure their people understand improvement.

Encourage Fearlessness
They always encourage fearlessness. Holding the quality bar as high as possible, embodying integrity, and relentless improvement is not the happy-go-lucky world that it may appear. Working in this way, you may find yourself at odds with others who would just as soon ship the product today – even without testing (it’s good enough, right?).

Be an Example
To be the one lone dissenting voice requires more than integrity, more than diligence, and more than merely questing for improvement. To alone say (and report and publicize) that the emperor has no clothes requires fearlessness. Great Lead Testers not only show this fearlessness, they encourage it in all of their people.

This is just the beginning. But if you understand the lessons above, you will be well on your way to Mastering the skills needed to be an effective (if not great) Lead Tester.

"You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor." -Aristotle