Wow, what a whirlwind! Functional testing, services testing, Cloud testing , SOX compliancy, hiring. Processes, a metrics program, contracts. It's not so much what to do, it's where to start. So I thought I'd start at the beginning. One of the biggest problems any new QA/QC manager has is the existing staff's preconceptions of "what testing should be" and "how testing should work". They base that on what they've experienced in past companies. The problem with that is often "QA" at those former companies was (ahem) somewhat less than what it could have been. Perhaps the testing staff weren't especially valued, and their sole contribution came at the end of the project where the problems they found inevitably led to project delays, or a product with problems in production due to lack of time to fix those problems. Sometimes they didn't test a certain type of application at all. Often they were ignored throughout the