Entries from April 2008 ↓

It’s appraisal time! Many companies conduct periodic reviews to give feedback on performance to their employees and to assist employees in developing their career. This appraisal period may be of six months or one year depending on company policies. Performance appraisal is the right time to ask for your promotion as well as salary raise.

Why performance appraisal?

To reward employees for their good work. Appraisal will assist employees to develop in their career and enable them to reach their full potential. Performance appraisal process involves discussion on the previous year employee achievements and identifying area for improvement. This will help employees to develop clear performance objectives for the next review period.

In this article I will concentrate more on “QA performance appraisal”. What are skills and parameters used to judge and rate the QA performance?

This article will help you in following ways:

• If you are a fresher and yet not faced any appraisal, you will get exact idea of what is performance review and how to face it.
• If you are an experienced quality assurance engineer then you will know “How to ask for promotion and salary hike in your performance review”.
• How to effectively summaries your hard work and responsibilities into a good impression in front of management.

In companies having yearly appraisal system, performance appraisal process begins a month before end of each financial year. Performance review forms gets distributed to every eligible employee with instructions on how to fill the form and to whom you need to send these filled forms. After that face-to-face review meetings are scheduled with reviewers.

Following major activities get discussed in review meeting:

• Project you did in previous year
• Employees overall performance
• Comments on performance ratings given by employee and reviewer
• Employee feedback
• Areas for improvements
• Performance planning for the next year.

What are the criteria’s to rate the employee performance?

We are specifically speaking about QA performance appraisal, so here are the main parameters considered while rating software testers/QA persons.

Software testing skills:

1. Ability to find bugs
2. Bug reporting skill
3. Ability to automate work
4. Test cases design ability
5. Testing completeness and coverage

Management skills:

1. Effective role model
2. Team motivation skill
3. Estimation and scheduling ability
4. Ability to anticipate and address issues
5. Mentoring ability
6. Planning and time management skill

Personal skills:

1. Can work independently?
2. Team player
3. Self learning
4. Discipline?
5. Willing to learn?
6. Takes initiative
7. Admit mistakes?
8. Grasping skill

Other skills:

1. Communication (Written and verbal)
2. Documentation skill
3. Interviewing skill (If applicable)
4. Training and presentation skill

Based on these parameters employee can give self rating from 1 to 10 for individual parameter and the overall rating as the average of all these ratings. Reviewer ratings will be there also in front of each skill and also reviewer’s final rating.

Ratings are classified like:
Rating from 1-5: Poor performance
6: Need improvements
7: Meets position requirements
8-9: Exceeds position requirements
10: Exceptional! Exceed all requirements all the time.

In performance appraisal form employee needs to give feedback on his/her work till date. Also feedback on company culture, work process and management style.

Employee feedback section is the best section to ask for promotion or salary hike. Mention your overall and relevant QA experience and your ability to handle more challenging work assignments. This will create solid base for management to decide the promotion and salary raise.

Reviewer will fill the “Employee performance planning for next appraisal” section. In this section he/she will address the improvement areas like technical and non-technical skills. Or other personal improvements. Reviewer needs to mention some specific goals employee need to meet for next appraisal. This will become base objective for next appraisal period.

This is the overall appraisal process. Now key part is how and when to ask for promotion and salary raise?

Here are some key points you need to study before asking for promotion and pay rise:

1) What are your previous year’s top achievements?
You should be ready with list of key projects you did in past year. How was the overall quality of work in this period? Note down some examples, which will illustrate your contribution to company growth.

2) Positive attitude:
Management like employees with positive attitude. Management will think about your leadership qualities before promoting you.

3) Your relationship with your boss and co-workers:
This is a crucial point. Make sure you don’t have any disputes between you and your boss or co-workers. You should be a fair team player.

4) Any major work issue in previous year?
You should be aware of project issues created by you. If these issues are major then think twice before asking for promotion or pay raise. If the issues are minor and you were not directly responsible for those issues then you can have explanation of these issues, if management raised these negative points in your appraisal meeting. Make sure you don’t blame any of your co-workers for any issue.

5) Explain why you deserve promotion:
You need solid work portfolio to explain this. Put forward your contribution to company and how this helped to improve the company.

6) Are you prepared to handle challenges of senior level positions?
Senior level position means more responsibilities. You need to have both technical as well as management skills to handle such positions. Explain how you are a best fit for the new position.

7) Be prepared to present exact amount to be raised in your salary:
If management is ready to promote you then you might get this question: How much pay rise you expect? So do a little study of current market salary range for your new position. Come to some exact figures by doing analysis of your current salary, company’s previous salary hike records and your accomplishments for the appraisal period.

8 ) Know the exact time for getting pay rise:
If you got promotion in last performance appraisal then ask for promotion in current appraisal only if you did some outstanding work. If company is in some financial problems then wait till company get out of this situation. (But don’t wait too much )

Conclusion:

In short be professionals and specific. Ask for promotion and salary rise, otherwise you will get nothing. Prove your hard work and responsibilities. Be prepared for any outcome. It may be positive or negative. You should be calm in your response and don’t forget to thank your boss and handshake at the end of the appraisal meeting.

Hope this article will help you to climb your career ladder efficiently and will add some professionalism in your career.

If you have a good or bad experience in your previous appraisals then don’t forget to share your experience with our readers. Other’s can learn something from your experience. After all this site is for growing in your career by sharing each other’s thoughts!

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Many companies and institutes are making group discussion as the first criteria for screening the candidates for face-to-face interviews. And there is reason too for giving huge importance for Group Discussion. First thing Group Discussion is used for mass elimination! And second thing group discussion selection criteria’s are based on actual company requirements.

Communication and Group Discussion skill are two relevant soft skills that are must for software testers.

Why group discussion should be the first criteria for selecting software testers?

Software tester requires communication with different people like team members, managers and customers. So interpersonal skill is very important for tester.

Yesterday one of our readers mailed me about her problem. She is very good at work but when it comes to taking credit for her work, someone else is taking the credit.

Why this is happening? She is lagging in interpersonal skills. Lagging in communication. She might be proficient in many skills, but what if she isn’t able to communicate her thoughts in front of her seniors or evaluators? Simply, she will lose the credits of her own work!

Making a good impression while speaking in meetings or interviews is the basic skill every professional should have. Let’s see how you can make this impression.

What skills are judged in group discussion?

• How good you are at communication with others.
• How you behave and interact with group.
• How open minded are you.
• Your listening skill.
• How you put forward your views.
• Your leadership and decision making skills.
• Your analysis skill and subject knowledge.
• Problem solving and critical thinking skill.
• Your attitude and confidence.

Do’s and Don’ts of Group discussion:

1) Keep eye contact while speaking:
Do not look at the evaluators only. Keep eye contact with every team member while speaking.

2) Initiate the GD:
Initiating the GD is a big plus. But keep in mind – Initiate the group discussion only when you understood the GD topic clearly and have some topic knowledge. Speaking without proper subject knowledge is bad impression.

3) Allow others to speak:
Do not interrupt anyone in-between while speaking. Even if you don’t agree with his/her thoughts do not snatch their chance to speak. Instead make some notes and clear the points when it’s your turn.

4) Speak clearly:
Speak politely and clearly. Use simple and understandable words while speaking. Don’t be too aggressive if you are disagreeing with someone. Express your feelings calmly and politely.

5) Make sure to bring the discussion on track:
If by any means group is distracting from the topic or goal then simply take initiative to bring the discussion on the track. Make all group members aware that you all need to come to some conclusion at the end of the discussion. So stick to the topic.

6) Positive attitude:
Be confident. Do not try to dominate anyone. Keep positive body language. Show interest in discussion.

7) Speak sensibly:
Do not speak just to increase your speaking time. Don’t worry even if you speak less. Your thoughts should be sensible and relevant instead of irrelevant speech.

8 ) Listen carefully to others:
Speak less and listen more! Pay attention while others are speaking. This will make coherent discussion and you will get involved in the group positively. You will surely make people agree with you.

9) No need to go into much details:
Some basic subject analysis is sufficient. No need to mention exact figures while giving any reference. You have limited time so be precise and convey your thoughts in short and simple language.

10) Formal dressing:
Do not take it casually. No fancy and funny dressing. You should be comfortable while speaking in group. Positive gesture and body language will make your work easy.

Follow these 10 simple rules to easily crack the GD.

Let’s have some bonus tips for Group Discussion success.

Here is an embedded Power point presentation on Group discussion topic.
Thanks to “SoftLogic Technologies” for providing this presentation to our readers.

Software Testing has lot of challenges both in manual as well as in automation. Generally in manual testing scenario developers through the build to test team assuming the responsible test team or tester will pick the build and will come to ask what the build is about? This is the case in organizations not following so-called ‘processes’. Tester is the middleman between developing team and the customers, handling the pressure from both the sides. And I assume most of our readers are smart enough to handle this pressure. Aren’t you?

This is not the case always. Some times testers may add complications in testing process due to their unskilled way of working. In this post I have added most of the testing challenges created due to testing staff, developing staff, testing processes and wrong management decisions.

So here we go with the top challenges:

1) Testing the complete application:
Is it possible? I think impossible. There are millions of test combinations. It’s not possible to test each and every combination both in manual as well as in automation testing. If you try all these combinations you will never ship the product

2) Misunderstanding of company processes:
Some times you just don’t pay proper attention what the company-defined processes are and these are for what purposes. There are some myths in testers that they should only go with company processes even these processes are not applicable for their current testing scenario. This results in incomplete and inappropriate application testing.

3) Relationship with developers:
Big challenge. Requires very skilled tester to handle this relation positively and even by completing the work in testers way. There are simply hundreds of excuses developers or testers can make when they are not agree with some points. For this tester also requires good communication, troubleshooting and analyzing skill.

4) Regression testing:
When project goes on expanding the regression testing work simply becomes uncontrolled. Pressure to handle the current functionality changes, previous working functionality checks and bug tracking.

5) Lack of skilled testers:
I will call this as ‘wrong management decision’ while selecting or training testers for their project task in hand. These unskilled fellows may add more chaos than simplifying the testing work. This results into incomplete, insufficient and ad-hoc testing throughout the testing life cycle.

6) Testing always under time constraint:
Hey tester, we want to ship this product by this weekend, are you ready for completion? When this order comes from boss, tester simply focuses on task completion and not on the test coverage and quality of work. There is huge list of tasks that you need to complete within specified time. This includes writing, executing, automating and reviewing the test cases.

7) Which tests to execute first?
If you are facing the challenge stated in point no 6, then how will you take decision which test cases should be executed and with what priority? Which tests are important over others? This requires good experience to work under pressure.

8 ) Understanding the requirements:
Some times testers are responsible for communicating with customers for understanding the requirements. What if tester fails to understand the requirements? Will he be able to test the application properly? Definitely No! Testers require good listening and understanding capabilities.

9) Automation testing:
Many sub challenges – Should automate the testing work? Till what level automation should be done? Do you have sufficient and skilled resources for automation? Is time permissible for automating the test cases? Decision of automation or manual testing will need to address the pros and cons of each process.

10) Decision to stop the testing:
When to stop testing? Very difficult decision. Requires core judgment of testing processes and importance of each process. Also requires ‘on the fly’ decision ability.

11) One test team under multiple projects:
Challenging to keep track of each task. Communication challenges. Many times results in failure of one or both the projects.

12) Reuse of Test scripts:
Application development methods are changing rapidly, making it difficult to manage the test tools and test scripts. Test script migration or reuse is very essential but difficult task.

13) Testers focusing on finding easy bugs:
If organization is rewarding testers based on number of bugs (very bad approach to judge testers performance) then some testers only concentrate on finding easy bugs those don’t require deep understanding and testing. A hard or subtle bug remains unnoticed in such testing approach.

14) To cope with attrition:
Increasing salaries and benefits making many employees leave the company at very short career intervals. Managements are facing hard problems to cope with attrition rate. Challenges – New testers require project training from the beginning, complex projects are difficult to understand, delay in shipping date!

These are some top software testing challenges we face daily. Project success or failure depends largely on how you address these basic issues.

For further reference and detailed solutions on these challenges refer book “Surviving the Top Ten challenges of Software Testing” written by William E. Perry and Randall W. Rice.

Over to you:
Many of you are working in manual and/or automation testing field. Though I have addressed many of above challenges in our previous articles, I want your views on handling these software testing challenges.  Feel free to express your views in comment section below.