One of the initial challenges faced by a QA lead or a manager in any department from product planning to development & testing, revolves around figuring the right composition of the team. The composition would depend on multiple factors like overall budget, tentative timelines, planned date to go live, approximate experience required in potential team members and domain competency to ramp up the project. If you have lead a team before then I am sure you can relate to these challenges. However, once you have the ‘ideal team composition’, the bigger challenge is setting the right goals for your test department.

1. How Professional QA Lead Set Goals
For A Test Department?

2. Internal Learnings & External Learnings
Unless and until the project
executed by you is very unique
(either in terms of functionalities,
scale, web design trends,
programming language being used,
etc.); there is a high possibility that
you would be able to find valuable
learnings within the organization or
outside the organization.

3. Defining Short/Long-Term Goals
Every activity that is planned
during the course of any project will
(or should) have a
tangible/measurable outcome
associated with it. While planning
the activities, the strategy that my
team & I followed is attaching
‘goals’ with each activity. There
could be short-term goals and long-
term goals.

4. Defining Short/Long-Term Goals
For example, if your team is building a web product and you wish to perform a thorough cross
browser testing to evaluate how well you web-app works when accessed through different
browsers and operating systems. In that case, the short team goal (as far as cross browser
testing) is concerned would be to perform functional & non-functional testing on most
popular/widely used browsers. LambdaTest offers you latest browser versions of Google
Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE, Edge and Yandexrunning on various operating
systems to perform manual and automated cross browser testing.

5. Defining Short/Long-Term Goals
While setting goals for test department, it should be necessary to keep the big picture in mind
and align these features with goals at your ‘organization level’ as well. In a nutshell, the defining
goals for your test department should be set on the following lines:
1. What are goals that are internal to the team?
2. What are the goals that align with the goals at the department level?
3. What are the goals that align with the goals at the organization level?

6. Team Size & Domain Competency
You don’t need the same count of testers as you have for developers. Having the
right team composition is important for the successful execution of any project.
This is applicable while setting up goals for the testing team as well.

7. Risk & Deadline Analysis
Irrespective of the size of the project, every task planned during the project
execution will have certain level of risks & assumptions associated with it. As a
test lead, you should do a thorough SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Analysis,
and Threats) analysis and come up with a risk mitigation plan. For example, if
you are working on a hardware product; you should add risks like delayed
shipment of test samples, delayed software deliverables from development
team, etc. into the risk mitigation plan.

8. Adapt As Per Your Environment
The approach that you follow for a startup (early-stage or growth stage) will be
quite different from the approach you follow for a multinational company. It
also depends on the team size and scale of the organization. Normally in a
startup there is flat hierarchy, hence the number of approvals from different
executives would be few in number.

9. Wearing Multiple Hats
Many organizations (irrespective of their size) are shifting to Agile
methodology where people & interactions are given more importance than
processes. The key advantage of the Agile approach over the traditional
Waterfall model is the improved level of communication between the
development & test team.

10. Competency Development
In the points that we have discussed so far, ‘project deliverables & deadlines’
have been associated with each task involved in development, debugging and
testing. Though you need to set goals to ensure that project timelines are met
and a quality application/software product is shipped to the customer, there
are many other factors that you need to consider while setting goals for your
test department.

11. What If you Only Have A Solo Or A Couple Software
Testers?
The major advantage of having a team of multiple software testers is that you
can find the flexibility of getting the work done by another tester if one is
unable to do so. However, things would look completely different when you
have a solo or a couple tester in the team.

12. To set up goals for test department, a well-balanced team is very important for the
successful execution of any project. Depending on the type & complexity of the
project, you should allocate the right number of test resources for ‘manual testing’
and ‘automation testing’. The senior members of the team should not only showcase
their technical know-how, but should also be responsible for motivating &
supporting the junior members of the team.
www.lambdatest.com
CONCLUSION

13. HAPPY TESTING!!