Three Seasons About QA World

Season 1: QA Team Building Adventures Based on 'Lost'

Who has never watched 'Lost' please stand up. This American drama television series about 48 passengers on Flight 815 from Sydney to Los Angeles whose plane crashes onto a mysterious island changed the TV market. The first season had an estimated average of 16 million viewers per episode.

When I think about the success of 'Lost', how critics regularly ranked it as one of the most outstanding television series of all time, or how many awards and nominations it has received, I firmly believe that management was the key to its success.

Plot, thread, action

The plot of “Lost” lived its own life - there was no big plan, no detailed scenario but only a concept and a general idea. Such a flexible approach allowed for the free formulation of the episodes’ plot depending on the actors’ popularity or stories. Production of “Lost” could be a great inspiration for modeling the QA team’s project management. There are many ways to build a QA team correctly, but it does not mean effectively and efficiently. For instance, a traditional, or rather theoretical, model assumes a test scenario’s preparation.

UAT scenario preparation would be a part of the Analysis stage of the below model:

Bureaucracy is Your Enemy

At the beginning, please note how this model is laborious. Preparing a full scenario test is a demanding, time-consuming job - and very often an inefficient one because it’s complicated to predict all scenarios. I remember a few years ago we were working for a big company. They wanted to have a test scenario - and they wasted 6 months preparing it. After that they asked us to find a solution - it took us 5 hours! Five hours of work after half a year of preparing for the test scenario. Incredible! A test scenario devours your time. And money, indeed.

We’re not trying to say that preparing test scenarios is bad practice - not at all, but often, the client has no time to prepare the test scenario - or the test scenario is prepared by the QA Team. By definition, the entire process will be ineffective. Imagine you must formulate a plan of your responsibilities at work.

Many Plots But One Head

To proceed the right way in building a QA team it is necessary to understand the client's priorities and requirements. When testers are engaged in many projects, they focus not on the business approach but on technical aspects. Many projects degrade the quality of testing and all QA work. They are testing it, not only monitoring the vital signs of an app. It's the best way to find better solutions to improve ecommerce day-by-day.

The Best Way for QA

Our QA Team cooperates very closely with the client. Often testers have such a profound understanding of customers' needs to make decisions on their behalf. It’s additional facilitation, and that's how it works now. It means that clients save time and money. We strongly believe that only deep consideration of the client's expectations will result in a properly developed cooperation model with a QA team.