Hmm. I find proposed answers to these questions somewhat... unexpected. Lacking, in fact. They focus so much on technical ability, and seem to ignore the human side of being a manager. Starting with the first one... "1) Let’s say you are the first QA manager joining our startup. What are the first three things you would do?" The kind of things I'd expect to hear here would never be of the kind 'write a test plan'. And I hardly believe anyone would be able to contribute a test plan right away, would they? I expect ability to write a test plan, or setup a process where it is created and managed, to be rather easy to check by just asking someone to do a test plan on an imagined scenario. The answer I would like much more would be: '1. meet the team', '2. understand the product, its vision, goals', '3. understand current dev/QA setup and code before I proceed'.
In other words, it seems to me that the first things to do should be to see where we are, connect with people rather than making things up. How can you propose first actions without at least basic understanding of where you are?
I like questions 5+ much better, but still these seem more suited for interviewing an experienced individual contributor, not a team manager.
How about setting up a team? How about hiring? How would you define and split tasks, assuming we agree on tasks? What kind of testing would you personally do, which would you delegate to QAs and which would you require to stay on the dev team? What would you do in situation X? (any difficult multi-optimization problem where people, technical and philosophical issues are to be considered)
I can imagine a great individual contributor to ace every single question on ths list, and then fail utterly when he has to manage even 2 people effectively.
This has been added:
"It is important for the QA manager candidate to ask questions of his own regarding the current process and the challenges facing the organization that led to the search for a QA manager."
The questions don't go into further details of managing and leading a team, there is a whole set of questions that are more tailored towards hiring a "QA team lead" - might be a follow on blog post.
At my company, we'd call the position the author is interviewing for "QA Lead". We subcontract QA testers, so they're not responsible for managing people beyond making sure work gets done.
I think these are great questions for QA leads, not the person who manages them.
In other words, it seems to me that the first things to do should be to see where we are, connect with people rather than making things up. How can you propose first actions without at least basic understanding of where you are?
I like questions 5+ much better, but still these seem more suited for interviewing an experienced individual contributor, not a team manager.
How about setting up a team? How about hiring? How would you define and split tasks, assuming we agree on tasks? What kind of testing would you personally do, which would you delegate to QAs and which would you require to stay on the dev team? What would you do in situation X? (any difficult multi-optimization problem where people, technical and philosophical issues are to be considered)
I can imagine a great individual contributor to ace every single question on ths list, and then fail utterly when he has to manage even 2 people effectively.