Delivery of a quality software product surpassing customer expectations with a wide range of services, but within budget. Sounds familiar?! Not only yours, This is the dream of every software organization today. Thanks to growing demands — time-to-market, rising customer expectations, global competition, geographically dispersed teams, organizational boundaries and others — for fueling this demand to the greater heights. So, Software Quality is the key factor which decides the success of a product. Result, Need for a dedicated testing team for a software project of any size. Having a dedicated testing team is not just sufficient.

Every project stake holder contributes for the quality either directly or indirectly. However, testing team by sitting at the delivery gate has a major stake in it. Because they are the one who ensures fulfillment of customer demands in the product before we make the delivery.

However, Testing is often looked upon by many as an unmanageable, unpredictable, unorganized practice with little structure. But this is just an illusion created due to consequences of time pressure By knowing the importance of the testing, every project plan initially budgets adequate time for testing. However, most software development ends up behind schedule for various reasons, leaving a couple of days for testing before it is shipped. This forces testing team into fire fighting mode. This is the normal phenomena that every test manger should expect and be prepared for.

This paper discusses issues that are vital to handle these pressures and enable test manager, so the team, to move forward towards high performance level. Every individual team needs unique solution to address these issues. With a set of guidelines, this paper helps you to identify such a solution for your team.

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