I’ve been reading about branding and customer development lately and decided  to exercise some of the concepts I’m learning.  One concept in costumer development is to think in terms of what the customer needs instead of what you provide.  To list benefits instead of features.

Since I do QA consulting, I thought I’d take a moment to think about what a QA manager might actually want, and then try to focus on what I can do to solve these pain points.

What do you want from QA?

1. To get automation running
2. To not have to maintain it
3. To keep test execution in house (for security and simplicity)
4. To not have to hire additional staff
5. To make test case management painless less painful
6. To not have to integrate yet another tool
7. To not have to spend more time and money on training
8. To get better coverage
9. To know what is being covered and what isn’t
10. To know what testing is finding the important bugs

This list is by no means exhaustive, and I’d love to hear what it is that you really want — either as a tester or manager.  Please leave comments or tweet @fijiaaron.