Team composition

The below image was copied from a FB post. It generates lot of humor and the meantime gives some room for more deep thoughts on what we are doing on our projects.

For the time being just assume that you are the QA Lead of a project which wants you to create a tree house. You have the same team as displayed in the below cartoon. Now think.....how you are going to accomplish your task. Now you see the value of each skill. Not just one skill will help you get there.

I am no brilliant but below will be my task allocations based on automation

Monkey : Will be my key resource who will play the anchor role
Elephant: Project might require lot of heavy timber. We now have person to take care of them.
Bird: Will help me to find where I can find good timber and will take care of monitoring the activities. Bird can move fast it is just that he cannot do heavy work. Also he will help me in finding other project materials like, ropes, better leaves for my roof and etc.

Penguin: I too agree, project context seems not to be a good one for Penguin but yet he can help the project a lot. He can work on clearing up the ground. Also more importantly he can work with the sea horse to put building materials in order in underneath the tree. So that others can save their time. Dog will lead the ground work team while helping with his effort.



Who is left? our little fish. Seems like no work for him. However did you notice? he is the only one who does not move and just watching all the activities. Why not we ask him to do our paper work? Finally he can be placed with our final product which is the tree house so that it will have a pleasant view for our clients.

So we are now in a situation where this project is doable with this team. It is very important to understand that each of are different and have expertise in different areas. In this project I would rather like to have few more monkeys because they best suite to the project context. However you can never think of building the house without an elephant no matter how many monkeys you have. It is also understood that having 10 elephants will not be productive as their maintenance is very high. Therefore having the diversity of your team is very important and in a way it will allow you to learn lot of stuffs.

When we think towards our actual work life, it leaves us a question! are we expending the same from all? for an example we cannot expect all the QA team member to do automation or performance testing equally. It is just like the cartoon above. In some cases it makes sense but in most of the cases it will likely reduce the positive impact of expertise of each team member. Therefore for me the most important thing is delivering the right product with correct behavior to clients. For that we need a variety of expertise inside QA team. Just like our story above. It will create a more Agile work environment.

Team composition is a very big area and worth continuing browsing more topics.

*This is not sea horse, I just cant remember the correct name :)