Professionals are busy people who always have to set goals and do their best to achieve them. As soon as your goals are achieved, success will arrive and you will become happy. But in case, your mission fails – be ready to face costly problems. 

In software testing, quality assurance companies do the same. They are responsible for accomplishing proposed projects, executing test cases. But, along the way, some organizations happen to pay no regard to the very important thing. They generally believe that they are right to pursue the goals they have been assigned, but, as a rule, they do not even care if these goals are worth achieving or not, namely if they are smart or not.

You are welcome to familiarize with one of the experiences acquired by a certain tester. He was working on a large project some years ago and was asked to import all test cases of the project into a test management tool and it was a top-priority task. The man disliked task very much because he had no interest in aimless or operational activities. He and his colleagues stored the test cases in Excel sheets and there were no so advanced importer tools at that time.  As a result, 3 long weeks were spent on performing the task.

First of all, all the test cases were found and then converted into valuable artifacts for the out-of-date importer and then they were imported into the test management tool. Further, they were organized in the tool database and finally he was done with his work. Thus, this person thought that he was absolutely prepared to provide software development quality assurance. However, after informing the manager about the completion he heard that it was too late to deliver the work.

But the tester did not feel abashed and said that it was not a specific task at all ,therefore, it involved neither clear explanations nor details. Moreover, the task was impossible to measure because the total number of tests cases was not actually defined at the very beginning. Again, the specialist did find it unattainable because his opinion was not considered and there was no agreement about anything.

All testers always face complicated tasks and objectives. Nevertheless, before falling into despair because you do not know how to reach your goals, please, try to analyze them and determine if they are measurable, specific, attainable, time-bound and relevant. Once you master goal setting process, you will be able to become successful in everything you choose to pursue and also to provide quality assurance consulting.