When approaching a new project or working in a new team, the first thing worth to do is having a user mindset. Trying to use our product as a customer and create user’s dataset help me understand what values the product deliver to users and what the main pain point is when using our product.

After having users’ mindset, it’s time to get an understanding of what is going on and learn the architecture of our product. I need to know the whole software process and what our team’s main task during the SDLC.

Getting a complete insight into my team is also a high-priority task, including reviewing any automated test scripts, reading product documents and specifications. Then I can define to what extent our test engineers can add value for the entire process.

It is crucial to setting up quality metrics for the product and SDLC, such as measure bugs number per 1000 code lines and rate of the bug-fixed, shipping delay rate, etc. After getting the current quality data, we can get down to list the tasks we should do and set priorities for them.

To summarize, understanding what is critical for our system under test is important, do not dive into details too early.