I’m uncertain as to why sometimes it’s so hard to explain the importance of ‘test leadership’.

People can have a lead architect, a lead product owner, a lead developer and even a ‘lead of leads’, but having a test lead would somehow kill autonomy…

The argument is in agile world the team does the job, so they should be self-reliant, and no one needed to ‘manage’ them.

What they fail to understand is testing with technical competence is not something abundantly available in the industry.

Most companies have to manage with the few senior resources they’ve got and use them to train rest of the teams.

IMHO the root cause is this deep-rooted ignorance that testing is just a matter of doing some ‘monkey testing’ and that’s about it.

I’d argue testing and specifically automation take as much resources as developing the service, whoever plays that role requires critical thinking, strong technical skill and exposure.

One would assume after decades of blunders and evolution we would have realized why strong testing is important, no wonder restating your PC when software is not working seems to be ‘perfectly normal’.