Job of a lead is never easy whether he is development lead or testing lead, and the toughest task is to put a pretty face and smile even when you are itching to hit the person in front of you. My day starts early, a quick connections of my laptop later, i check through mails, planned out a few things in between running to the kitchen to make tea, nothing refreshes me like a big cup of tea really. I called my manager and discussed my plan for the day. Then quickly disbursed the plan to the team and rushed to office (as if they would be there before me to start executing the plan, naive as I like to be sometimes)
The team was there alright, with one or two faces missing (did i say this is customary esp on delivery days), I was almost driven to the verge of hitting it out, today was delivery day and everyone is supposed to be in by decent time on top of that, the fact that they did not bother to inform the lead further boiled my blood.The PM has this habit of dropping by when I am most unprepared and he lived upto his reputation by walking into our cube, "so is everybody in" he asks "yessss....almost" I muttered, not sure and hoping he does ask me the names/count, which he did a couple of seconds later. Having walked in few minutes back myself i was not sure of my team members whereabouts and so it definitely was a tough one to answer. Thanks to his blackberry which came to my rescue, an imporant call needed his attention and he left.
I used the time, gathered my nerves, reminding myself that it wont work if I get angry with the team, I calmed down and tried to find out what kept the couple of guys away. Then realizing (that is the option to choose when you have no choice) that profession and personal emergencies can occur at any time for anyone, I decided to focus on whoever was present (probably learnt to look at positive side of things), after looking over their shoulder to see they were indeed executing like i wanted them to i settled into my own, things i thought looked up.
A visit to PM cube, "how does it look, can we meet deadline" he asks? "it looks good" i replied, probably the words fell out before I had time to reflect on them, happens when u r a lead for first time leading a team of 10 testers, i forgive myself ?(all the time :)) but he advised which i will never forget that "it is important that it looks good in the evening/at end of day and not in the morning" amen to that, i thought
By evening his words stung me time and again, the spirits had sagged and all did not look as flowery several environment problems later we were through with only 50% of test cases of what was targeted for the day. Leads call was half an hour away and even asking the team after every 5 minutes if the test cases were moving did not change the numbers drastically, at last I gave up and went in..i was greeted by my PM with a question mark on his face.....he somehow manages to show on his face what he is thinking and the look did not do anything to make me feel any better :(......the meeting went by,,,,,,,with PM's rescuing me when he could.
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