“Reward testers for finding good quality bugs. Keep some weekly or monthly competitions such as ‘Bug of the week’ to reward them.  This will help to build a successful QA team”.

The same concept is used by Eric Jacobson – a software tester, to keep motivation alive in his testing team. Eric found interesting idea to reward good testers. The idea of holding a bug contest. And decided to award the ‘Mercury’ cap to the tester who could log the most bugs in a given week. See the winner of his contest.

A small tweak I would rather suggest to make this technique more effective is to award the testers who will find the quality bug, may be called as “Bug of the week”. This way quality bugs will be the main focus of software testers rather than running behind the quantity. Obviously you should not ignore those small UI bugs also

I am really fan of awarding testers for their good work. It may be any kind of appreciation. May be a small gift or just few kind words of appreciation from the lead or manager. This will keep the spirit alive in testers to find new and quality bugs.

If you are a team leader, manager or even a team member, what do you think is the best way to keep motivation alive in software testers?

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How to keep motivation alive in software testers?

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“I was intrigued by your website because it seems you are truly passionate and interested in testing.  In my organization, we’ve found that it’s really hard to keep the GOOD testers in testing.  Many of the really skilled testers are always looking for change and want to get out of testing for some reason.  I would love to hear if you have any ideas on how to keep the good testers in testing?”

Teresa, first I will address this high attrition rate problem for all employees and then I will come back to addressing “How to keep good testers in testing positions?”

0% employee turnover is just a imagination and unrealistic in current competitive world. Employee turnover to certain extent is ok. However increased turnover in any company indicates some serious problems.

Though I am not a HR expert to reduce the attrition rate, I will suggest some common measures from employee perspective, which can minimize this turnover to certain extent. These measures will be applicable for every company and employee. Also we are in context of software testing so I will concentrate more on how to retain good testers in their positions.

I will address each and every solution we can try to keep low attrition rate. So sit back, get relaxed as this is going to be a long article.

Who will get help from this article?

This article will helpful to Company management, Managers, Team leads in development and testing and of course to the emerging testers who are tomorrow’s leads.

What are the effects of high attrition rate on company?

• May lose projects in hand – as clients are not happy with high attrition rate
• Financial burden on company
• Cost to recruit new employees
• Cost of new employee training
• Time for ramp-up in new projects
• Workload on existing employees
• Low employee productivity due to unstable work and overtime

These are few important drawbacks of high attrition rate.

How to reduce attrition rate?

First let’s go to root cause of “why employee leave the company?”
The main reason is “lack of appreciation for their hard work”. I mean if company is not caring about employees then why would they stay in such company?

Keep in mind ‘more money’ is not always the solution! Nowadays employees are more concerned about quality of life and their family needs.

Here are some solutions on high attrition rate:

• Hire the right people in right positions
• Understand the employee needs and provide it to them
• Respect them
• Always appreciate good work
• Regularly ask for employee input and take appropriate action
• Offer training opportunities to gain advanced knowledge
• Better to become employee oriented
• Pleasant working atmosphere
• Career growth opportunities
• Value employee creativity
• Job security

Last one is very important. Your employees should feel secure about their jobs. If you can’t provide job security or at least feeling of job security in employees mind then your company deserve for high attrition rate.

These are some one liner solution. Let’s take some practical solutions.

Motivation:
Any software team should consist of highly motivated and skilled people. Good motivation comes from good leadership. Good leadership provided by team leaders and managers can bring down the attrition rate. In my career I observe employees leave the company just because of their boss. Some unrealistic demands or lack of motivation and leadership can make employees think over their position and career.

So leaders should motivate and energize colleagues when they lost all hopes.

More Money:
Give them a good compensation and benefit package.

Fun at work:
As I said money is not always the solution, fun at work is also important. Only more money can’t motivate the team if you don’t have fun culture in your company. I believe in “Work hard, Play hard” culture, so plan some sporting activities, outdoor trips, different competitions between different teams etc etc… There can be so many such activities, which can act as refreshment for employees.

Help to settle employee life:
What I mean from this is to help employees providing stability in their life. I know this is not going to be a simple task but company can help employees by providing medical insurance, medical facilities to employees. Housing is the first priority of most of the employees. So help them getting good accommodation.

‘Teresa’, you asked about retaining testers in good positions. So let’s come to testers problem.

What are the common complaints from testers?

“Sometimes developers ego as they are better than testers”
“Tester is responsible for every fault”
“Schedule slips due to testers”
“Testers are not getting the respect”
“Management don’t consider them equally with developers”

These are some common complaints from testers and this makes them feel insecure in their job, affecting their daily work and may result in high attrition rate.

Management needs to address these complaints early before testers leave the company. The solution is – organize your teams effectively, improve communication between developers, testers and management. This will lead to better understanding and addressing of testers needs.

Below are the baby steps, which can retain good talented testers in their positions:

Provide them training:
Train all your testers. Provide them training for free, if not possible then with cheap cost. Make available some remote courses, seminars and books to study. Sponsor and help them to get the software testing certifications.

Appreciate the good work:
Don’t go behind the quantity of bugs. See the quality of bugs and appreciate those testers working hard to find it. Regularly comment positively on good work from the team.
Reward testers for finding good quality bugs. Keep some weekly or monthly competitions such as “Bug of the week” to reward the testers.  This will help to build a successful QA team.

Set finite boundaries to everything:
Your goals should have clear boundaries and completion criteria. Setting goals, those not having end can become a boring task. Don’t let feel the team that this testing work is going forever without any insight goal.

Take every bug as a learning opportunity:
Don’t bother testers about the bugs that slip through. Make these bugs as a learning opportunity. Let them know why they overlooked that bug. This way they will learn from their mistakes and will not make the same mistake again at lest for the same bug.

Don’t make testing a repetitive task:
Some times we get bored doing same thing again and again. Testers job involve with repetitive task. So take care to distribute your work so that no tester will execute same test case repetitively on any project. Randomize the testing work in team, this way team will get knowledge of whole product, helping to find more bugs.
Good solution to avoid repetitive work is to rotate the experienced employees internally in different projects.

Create good relation between testers and developers:
Testers need encouragement and support to find more and more bugs so that the final release is bug free. Build a good team of testers and developers. Treat everyone similarly.

Don’t forget to celebrate:
Celebrate each and every success moment. This will help to build good team spirit. Host product release parties to recognize accomplishment.

Conclusion:
Show your appreciation to those employees who work hard. This is a key to successful business. Show your employees that you are committed to fulfill their needs.

Over to you:
These are my personal thoughts to keep good employees (testers) in their positions. I am not a HR expert but I have mentioned here everything what I feels from employee perspective to stay on the job.

I want your views “What keeps you on the job?” You can share your personal thoughts, your expectations from employers or any personal experience in this matter.

If you are not yet the regular reader of this site, I recommend you to subscribe with us so that you won’t miss any single article on software testing. Click here to get new articles in your inbox!

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How to keep good testers in testing positions?

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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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How to ask for promotion and salary raise in this appraisal

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It’s not possible to address each and every question in detail as I observed the questions are on vast topics, for which detail answers will itself require a new article. I will answer such questions in brief here and will also write detail articles separately if required.

So let’s get some questions answered:

Naresh A. asks:

“My past experience was related to “Test Engineer”. Recently I am appointed as Test Lead in a product based company. Currently there is no Pre-established testing process. As a TL am meant to define a standard process for the entire testing flow and I will maintain certain documents for each product.
Can you help me out in establishing a process for testing, and make me know the entire responsibilities of TL and what documents I am supposed to prepare and maintain?”

As a team leader you are responsible for project planning, scheduling, communicating your project status to your manager and most important task of assigning and monitoring the project work. Your main responsibility is to build a team to achieve your project goals. You need to focus on handling the challenges in your project so that your team and project will grow and perform well.

As far as the standard testing process is considered, it’s depends on you – what procedure you want to establish. Yes some people might blame me for this point but I prefer to establish my own processes that work for me. I don’t stick to those old process definitions that are written and managed in some 90’s and most of which might not applicable nowadays.

Test lead is responsible for ensuring project plan changes are incorporated in test plan. You might write a test plan and test strategy (In some cases it might be written by senior test team member or even by project test manager) Ensure the work is going according to this test plan. Identify the risks and try to mitigate them. At the end of project testing life cycle ensure that all test objectives are accomplished and acceptance criteria is met.

More TL responsibilities includes: Test Case Review, Requirements Validation, Monitoring the execution of manual and automated test cases, Prepare test summary report and Communicate test status to seniors and prepare corresponding documents.

To know more on SQA processes read this article “SQA Processes- How to Test complete application“. Hope from this answer you will get good idea of testing processes and TL responsibilities.

Pavan Ankus asks:

“I am appearing for the QA positions in US. I would kindly request you to mail me the suitable challenging situations in manual testing and also since I don’t have domain knowledge in Insurance, finance and other financial domain experience I am finding hard to explain to the interviewer as an experienced person. In this regard I need your suitable answer as to how to face the interviewer?”

In every testing interview you will get this question: “Tell me any challenging situation you faced in your previous projects or Tell me any bug that you feel proud to find it?”

I think answers to these questions depend on your testing career. I know every one of you might have faced many challenging situations where exceptional thinking is required to solve such problems.

I will suggest to pick any such situation from you career and explain it in better way. At least it should sound challenging This will help you to face further questions from interviewer depending on your answer.

The broad challenges in manual testing are: How to ensure complete test coverage? Testing without an automation tool is itself a big challenge. You can also explain non-technical challenges in manual testing like managing the testing work in critical time (Llink to testing under time limit) i.e. completing testing before deadline and even worst case if the deadline itself is not feasible.

Explaining a challenging bug you found in your career can be also a good answer for this question. For example the bug that was difficult to find or reprove or having big impact on customer revenue etc.

Pavan you mentioned that you don’t have knowledge in banking and finance domain then how you expect from yourself to give answer on that? If you don’t have experience in banking and finance domain then do not put this as a skill in your resume just for the sake of matching your profile with employer requirements. If you really want to get into testing of BFSI (Banking, Financial services and Insurance) domain then first study this domain. Know the basic concepts in BFSI domain. See the resources I have listed on BFSI domain on our resource page. Keep in mind you can answer in detail about any question if you have worked on that.

Mitch asks:

“What is the best way to go about getting a pay rise? Is reporting and graphing bugs found compared to other team member a good idea?

Comparing the bug count with other team or team member is very bad idea to ask for pay rise. If you are working for the organization for long time then your employer know your value and importance in organization. There is no need to show how your bug count graph is higher than your counterparts.

So what is the best way to ask for good salary rise?
At the time of your performance appraisal you should be able to convince to your reviewer that how you worked hard for your organization, How you succeeded in managing difficult tasks and how you enhanced your skills to better match your current work profile. If you succeed in this negotiation then you will definitely get good pay rise.

Other factors considered while giving you pay rise:
Your relevant skills, Complexity of application you are working on, problem solving skill, total and relevant experience, education and certifications.
Ask your questions in below comment section.

Read the previous article on testing questions and answer part1.
If you want to get your questions answered then Subscribe via email.

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Software testing questions and answers

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What do we mean by a great software testing team?

“A team with a star player is a good team, but a team without one is a great
team.” – Author unknown.

The above quote from Author leads us to discussion on great teams and its characteristics. The article stems from experience gained while working for different teams, observation of team members behavior under time pressure coupled with complex nature of project.This holds good for Software Testing team which finds prominence place in a project activities and requires right mix of people for performing these activities.

Why does some software testing team fails and others succeed? Is there any solution for this problem.The answer is “Yes”/”No” – depends on how the team member aligns himself towards common goal of the team not at the cost of suppressing his team members interest but working together with common understanding of problem at hand.
The success also depends on leadership attributes possessed by Test Leads –“Captain of ship”.

The objective of this article is to help software test engineers or any person who believes in team work,to understand characteristics of high performance team and how to cultivate them in their own teams.

Success of team in long run doesn’t depend on individual who is considered “STAR” but does depends on all who form clusters of stars that makes great team.

Characteristics of Great Software Testing Team

Initial stage – Ask yourself following question:

Does your new team member knows the reason he has been selected for the team?

New members of the team are often puzzled about their presence in team.Although you may argue that he/she need not know purpose and just work on task assigned to him/her.This is assumption made by many higher management people.By clearing defining the roles and responsibilities helps individuals to understand the project in bigger context.That includes the relevance of his/her job,skills of individuals that could be contributed towards the projects,share common team goal which was defined earlier.This does bring great commitment towards the work and hence contributes towards its quality.

Ownership:

When project complexity increases in terms of tasks and team size, it would not be possible to keep track of individuals tasks by single leader.Hence the solution to this would be assigning Ownership to individuals. However this virtual leadership often act as a impediment rather than solution if not considered appropriately. Mere appointment of individual as Owner without considering a serious thought of whether he/she could manage their team would not bring desired result.

Individuals acting as owners should have mindset which matches leaders mindset and the pride on their part to act as future leaders. These are people who could make difference by carrying along with them their team members and the same people by showing Indifferent attitudes towards their team will disintegrate the team. The task of owners is not merely restricted to assigning task to team members but to understand task at hand, situation at much broader perspective and bringing common level of understanding among their team members. Support their team member at the time of difficulty of handling task,word of encouragement,correcting their mistakes by not acting as lead but as a peer,acting up on ideas or taking advice for appropriate situation from experienced members would certainly benefit towards shared goal. Collaboration and a solid sense of interdependency in a team will defuse blaming behavior and stimulate opportunities for learning and improvement.

Knowledge of seasoned players in the team

The term-seasoned players indicates the person who has spent considerable amount of time in same project or similar kind of work. They are resources who have vast knowledge about project. By channeling their knowledge in proper way,the entire team could be benefited.These individual should show an act of diligence towards others work rather than arrogance.It is commonly said “Past success breeds arrogance”. They are higher performers who’s absence could be felt in a team but it should be not sole criteria as there are equal chance for others who has similar caliber to act at this position.

Motivation – Key Factor

Motivation is not all about giving speech when members of team are assembled but rather every effort should be made to tailor these speech to address each individual. This means each of team member has unique qualities and unique working style. This task is rather complex than said for Test Lead since it will bring effort on leaders part to sense the team member’s feeling not only to task assigned to members but also on project as whole. Positive attitude of lead will energies team – This is quoted from experience working for one of great test team.If the leader complains about long working hours or insisting the team members to work at schedule which is impossible to meet, your team will reflect your attitude. He/She is true leader who inspite of unreasonable schedule instills the confidence among team members to believe in their abilities and at the same time working at the background on his part to justify his team members effort working on unreasonable schedule but bring an extension to these schedule to make his team members job simple.

Recognition

Everyone likes to be recognized for his/her work.When an individual is awarded for his/her work,the responsibility of team lead should bring reason for individual recognition in front of others. The team lead decision for these kind of task should be impartial.This does bring great respect for the awarded individual by members in the team. They would be acting on similar grounds and ultimately team benefits from their collective response. Very often that members working for virtual leader often are not recognized since due to zero visibility to the leader of team. It is virtual leader who has to bring on table the accomplishment,contribution done by team member towards their task.This indicates that virtual leader is future leader who does take care of members of his team and well received by members of his team to whom they always wanted to be associated in future.

One-One basis Meeting

It is often seen that roles and responsibilities for the members are defined and assessment is done at the end of project.Agreed that it is formal process.But informal talk like One – One basis adds to this formal process as well. These informal meeting should address issues at present whom members wont feel like conveying during group meeting, future opportunities for members, identifying future leaders/owners of the team and equally acting on issues at hand after feedback from team members.Timely and appropriately delivered feedback can make the difference between a team that hides mistakes and a team that sees mistakes as opportunities. The responsibility for poor performance is usually a function of the team structure rather than individual incompetence; yet, it is individuals who are sent to training programs for fixing. If team members feel like they are pitted against one another to compete for rewards and recognition, they will withhold information that might be useful to the greater team. When a team has problems, the effective team leader will focus on the team’s structure before focusing on individuals.

“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.” – George Patton

Conclusion

There are plenty of things to be considered while building successful team.The key words – Unity,Trust,Respect for others opinion and acting without fear are ingredients for great test team,in general for any successful team. After reading this article look at your team and question yourself “Are you working in great test team” or “ Will you make every effort to build great test team”.Then don’t wait,try next second to build “Great Software Testing Team”.

“Coming together is a beginning, Keeping together is progress, Working together is success”. – Henry Ford

Over To You!

What do you think from your experience, What are your characteristics for building a successful QA team?

About author: Sharath R. Bhat is a Software Test Engineer at Torry Harris Business solutions, Bangalore and has more than three years experience in software Testing. An ISEB/ISTQB Certified Test Engineer and worked in Telecom, Finance and Healthcare domains. Areas on technical expertise include testing Web Applications, Client-Server, Data Warehousing and Middleware applications built using “Kabira”.

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How to build a successful QA team?

Thank you so much!