Is it reasonable for only a development lead to interview a person for a testing lead position?

Question

It is feasible to base the decision to hire a testing lead on only the feedback from a development lead? Testing is something different from coding and it has different methodologies. Like every technology, a tester learns new things everyday and it will never end.

Since a development lead is different than a testing lead, it will not be possible for the dev lead to know all the methodologies and processes involved in testing. So what is the probability that the recruitment is feasible if done by development lead only and not by higher management?

Answer 1

It's usually always bad if the interview process is completed by one person. You don't need both people in the interview but I always do better when there are other people there asking with slants on questions.. You need breadth of experience to assess people. Its not about upper or lower management, its about experience and requirements understanding.

Answer 2

I would submit that development leads might have a better idea what is needed in a testing lead than higher management would. If you don't actually have a testing lead right now, who else is really available to ask the questions? You can't ask the current testers to do it as they may be applying for the job. Dev leads work closely with testing (or they should) and having that person be someone they can work with is helpful.

Answer 3

Yes, it is feasible if the testing lead position is going to be the second person at a company. In this case, the development lead is the whole company.

I'm not sure I agree that developers don't know testing methodologies as if you look into Test-Driven Development or various Computer Science courses that cover testing there can be some exposure there. For example, I remember learning about black box testing and white box testing in second year Computer Science when I was university.

Answer 4

I think it really depends on the dev lead.

Some devs understand and respect testing and QA, understand the techniques, cooperate regularly with testers, write some test plans, and ideally also write good tests themselves before sending out their stuff to be tested by QA. I've worked with people like that, and I would trust their judgement on testing. A Dev lead can make a good call about this even if he doesn't know much about QA. Though he might want somebody to confirm real familiarity with the tools.

Some other devs believe that testers and QAs are one step above trained monkeys (since they can reproduce some errors) whose sole purpose in life is to badger devs so they can't get their important work done, and who are not smart enough to understand "real development". These devs would tend to prefer to hire people who fit their expectations.