Roles of a Team Lead

As a team lead you may need to fulfill many different roles in a team. In this post, I’ll highlight few of the roles which will be useful from Mintzberg's Management Roles theory. Let’s see how we can use these to improve team performance.

Figurehead Role 

This is a ceremonial role which involved humans. As a team lead in Software firm you are required to get involved with two parties who are knowledge workers. Those parties they are, the customer and the team. In the modern world, I believe people interaction is a key and you shouldn't play this role as a rule or part of your routine job. It has to be more informal approach. Hence you need to please both parties to have successful deliveries.

Interviews and Fresh Graduates

After conducting several interviews  with fresh graduates it was evident that most didn’t do well due to small mistakes.  Since they are graduates, they are obviously knowledgeable candidates but lacking in experience. Whenever possible I have suggested areas of improvement which can benefit them in the future. 

So I thought of jotting down my “5 cents worth“ for fresh graduates who want to start their career as an engineer in Product Quality.

1. Bust the myths 

• Testing is a very easy job.
• Testing is a job you should select if you don’t get a proper job
• You don’t need to get ready for interviews
• Recognition is very low as a Quality/Test engineer than a Developer

Consider the points above, they are myths! I won’t go into detail but will give a brief outline on overcoming them.

Testing is only a task. There are many tasks that we need to perform to assure product quality. What is product quality? It’s the customer expectation of a product. For e.g. when you want to buy a phone, you look at a particular brand. This is because branded phones are considered to be of good quality. So as Product Quality Engineers (Test Engineers), this is our role. Do you think this is an easy job?

Things to know when testing Mobile applications

When testing using the traditional method on windows/web applications, we all know that we need to test functionality. The same concepts apply for Mobile applications for smart phones as well. As testing experts we should ensure the functionally of the application. While we perform functional testing we need to consider the following points as well.

Testing matrix

In the mobile market there are more than 835 million smart phones available and it is ever increasing. The testing matrix is complex and it is important to select the correct testing matrix as the test environment. Therefore the points below should be helpful:

•  OS and Browser 
•  Device model 
•  Wireless connectivity 
•  Location 
•  Network bandwidths 
•  Audience 

Cost of Quality

This time I thought of discussing about a concept about Cost of Quality in a product.

What is cost of Quality? The simple answer is to the cost involved in maintain or add quality to a product/service that you are providing to a customer. So how it’s important to an organization? Cost is directly involved with the profit. When cost goes down, profit will go up where revenue is constant.

Now let’s talk this topic in detail.

When discussing the Cost of Quality, there are 3 costing types involved.

1. Prevention cost
2. Appraisal cost
3. Failure cost

Prevention Costs

Cost involved in preventing failures is prevention cost. There are many tasks which are performed in order to capture failures soon in the life cycle. It can be any product development methods.

Let’s have list of tasks which will cost in prevention of occurring failures,

• Establishing a process
• Planning for quality
• Acquiring new tools and use them
• Trainings to improve competency
• Adopt best practices and leanings from past experience