Optimize for success

"With great power comes great responsibility" - Stan Lee

Self-management can be a double-edged sword without discipline and a plan. Many teams including QA now have SMART goals to guide you, however you must guide yourself on a daily basis in order to achieve monthly SMART goal expectancy

Let's focus on the latest real-life use case:
   1) Testing weekly plan was defined: use up to 2 hours per day to test patches and focus on testing our new enterprise product for the remainder of the day
   2) Testing weekly plan was refined and approved - by the end of this week we'll have 2nd testing round of enterprise product wrapped up
   3) Week is almost over, however enterprise product 2nd testing round has just started and will be postponed for 3-4 days

What happened? Here's what I heard:

   A) "We had too many patches to test and this took a lot of time"
These patches were preplanned in the weekly test plan - it is not an excuse to violate weekly test plan. Our goal isn't to fully regression test each patch and verify its readiness for production but to focus on verifying those few (usually 1-2) bug fixes, spot-test core functionality and get it out to the customers who requested it

   Solution: dedicate a fixed chunk of time for testing each patch build, up to 1 hour; first verify fixed bugs then spot-test core functionality and finally send the patch testing summary. If the whole QA team found no core functionality issues during this time, it is highly unlikely that the single customer who requested the patch will find any; if there are new issues, we'll quickly re-patch without wasting much time

   B) "We had too many Support team forwarded cases that we stuck with for a long time in order to not forward them to developers"
What I'm seeing is ~82% of Support forwarded cases handled within the QA team which is way above 50% SMART goal; although this will be measured more precisely soon and is also an important goal, you must optimize your time better - taking 4-5 hrs to stick with a single support issue is an overkill and will inevitably cause your other SMART goal (Zig score) to suffer and our products to be late to production due to testing delays

   Solution: dedicate a fixed chunk of time for sticking with a support issue, especially if you are over the 50% SMART goal expectation for the month. Discover your own diminishing return point and use it to balance out the SMART goals when you make no progress with the support case at hand

   C) "We had many ad-hoc issues that piled up and took more time than actual testing, developers needed help with specific bugs, new team member needed guidance, there were team planning meetings, bugs needed priority corrected as we updated severity guidelines, Skyfall is premiering in the movies this week"

   Solutions:
   a) Dedicate a fixed chunk of time for team planning meeting (learn from Daily scrum) - 30min max
   b) When creating bugs, explain them in more details so devs don't ask you to clarify them - this will save time for both you and the devs on the long run
   c) Don't go to see the new James Bond movie until you have achieved daily SMART goal of at least 50 Zigs
   d) Before finishing a workday stop for a minute and ask yourself: "Have I achieved all my daily SMART goal expectations and are we on track with the weekly plan?" If the answer is yes, go ahead and have a scary night watching Paranormal Activity 4