How to Lead A Testing Team Successfully?

Groucho Marx once said, “Behind every successful man there is a woman, behind her is his wife’”. Similarly, behind a successful application or product, there is a hard-working testing team. And a QA lead is responsible to manage his testing team. A QA lead requires a fine blend of soft, technical, and leadership skills. An automation testing company looks for an industry expert who has the experience of working with various teams under tough circumstances. There is no secret recipe of a perfect lead but the following things can help in leading a testing team successfully:

1. Team Introduction

Firstly, a lead must have a fun introductory session with their team members. For starters, leads usually begin with a quick meeting where the main agenda is getting to know all the team members. Their knowledge, strengths, weakness, and technical backgrounds are key points that help a lead in assigning challenging and achievable tasks.

2. Strategy

Devising a strategy is one of the most crucial stages during product development. This usually defines the factors behind the success or failure of a product. Thus, leads conduct meetings with teams and communicate the strategy to them. They also stress how quality assurance can help them fill in the loopholes during software testing.

3. Clear Targets

Once the team leads define strategies, it is time to set clear targets for all team members. Team leads often divide the two into the following categories:

1. Product/Client expectation
2. Team expectation

By the end of a project, team leads review reports with respect to both categories. This allows members to reflect on the challenges they faced during project lifecycles and strategies to handle them. This leaves a huge impact on the team as they get to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

4. Performance Tracking

It is very important for team leads to keep their testers and developers motivated and committed to their work. This is why individual performance tracking is necessary so that each lead can appreciate each individual for their achievements.

5. Feedback

Leads carry out sprint meetings on a weekly basis in order to share honest feedback with their teams. This doesn’t mean discouraging any specific individual for weakness or failed attempt. This activity helps to keep other members involved and motivated to learn from their achievements. On the contrary, team members also share their ideas with the rest for knowledge and experience sharing.

There are no hard and fast rules that can make a perfect QA lead but there are things that QA leads can consider when leading a team. It is important for a lead to be motivated and possess leadership skills so that the lead can ensure that their team can cope up with the pace of short-delivery releases which are a norm in software development.