Importance of Planning, Management and Testing

       2)      Resource Management

       3)      Motivation

       4)      Test Process management

·         Planning is one of the important activity which plays an important role in the successful delivery of the project. If proper planning is not done, then the entire project might be screwed.

·         A good plan helps to manage time, cost, quality, potential risks and to focus on the project goals.

·         Project planning involves different tasks such as creating a set of plans which helps to execute the project in an organized way and to complete the tasks within the specified deadlines.

·         During the project execution, some issues may occur which impacts the execution flow resulting in the delay of specified tasks. So keeping the “Buffers” in the planning phase is important.

·         A proper plan also helps to improve the communication with the clients, define the goals clearly and increase the transparency of the work.

·         Helps developers, testers, users and other stake holders to understand the project and their role in its success.

       2)      Resource Management:

·         In project management, resources include people, equipment, cost and time. But most of the important resource is people.

·         Allocating right people with right skillset at the right place is very important.

·         The work of project manager or lead is not only allocating the right people at the right place and tracking the work progress but also to take care that the employees are not feeling frustrated or pressurized to do work by maintaining the good work atmosphere.

·         Always be a leader and not boss. Because employees like to work under a leader and not a boss who only gives order and do nothing.

·         Always respect the employees irrespective of FTE or vendor.

·         Treat your employees as friends and not labors/slaves.

·         Motivation is an important factor and continuous process which drives people to work harder and more productive for the organization.

·         Motivation helps to increase the performance level of the employees resulting in overall success of the project.

·         Motivation can be through rewards, appreciation, celebrating the success of the project with all team members, creating a work friendly environment.

·         Provide opportunity to achieve individual goals and to learn new skills.

·         Managing the entire testing process is a difficult task since the testing needs to complete within the specified deadlines.

·         Before starting testing, the testing team should know what to test and how to test and should prepare the test plan accordingly.

·         Selection of appropriate process model depending on project goals is very important. Nowadays, Agile model is popular. But sometimes in this process model, people tend to change the plans more frequently which will badly impact on the performance of the project.

·         Generally, application will be tested by executing same test cases for multiple iterations to ensure there are no regression issues. But in case of tight deadlines, sometimes it is better to reduce the number of iterations and better to concentrate on adhoc testing to discover new defects.

·         Monitoring the testing process helps to keep track of status of testing to ensure that it is done within the specified deadlines and helps for better planning in the next iterations.

·         Monitoring also helps to identify the potential risks and to manage the impact of change on the project.

·         Reporting helps to evaluate the overall quality of the application and to convey the same to different project stakeholders.

·         Reporting the right information is very important. It helps to analyze the testing efforts and based on this test metrics will be defined.