QA Venn Skillset Maps

I would like to share with you this little trick.

I use it every time when I need to find out, how hard it would be to learn something new. You can use it for yourself or for your team members. There are a lot of situations when you may need it, for instance:
-- you are building a matrix of competence, 

-- or calculating the team capacity,

-- you are thinking about taking a different a job, 

-- or starting a new project and not sure if you are up to it,

-- or maybe you are hiring someone and need to assess their skillset.

Average QA expertise can be represented as a Venn-like diagram. As you can see, it consists of three major parts:

• skills related to the test itself (QA): such as QA theory, certain cognitive skills, decision making skills, logic in a broader sense;
• tools-related skillset (Tools): knowing our tools, whatever they are, from test management systems to programming languages;
• knowledge of the domain (Domain): dark secrets of this particular trade, be it banking, telecommunication or IOT.

Here are a couple of use cases for this model.

Suppose you need to assess someone's (or yours) capability of doing something and how much time and effort it will cost you. To do so you need to draw a diagram of what your project requires, for instance, big circle for domain and two smaller cirles for tools and test part. In that case best match will be a specialist knows the domain perfectly, even if they are not that good with other two circles.

It will also work if you want to identify a person who is overqualified or underqualified for your project. For instance, you have a big domain and smaller test and tools circles. And a candidate you are interviewing seems to have a small domain block but big tools and test circles. This kind of mismatch may indicate a risk that your project will become boring for that specialist very quickly.


Or, alternatively, if a specialist's tools circle is a bit smaller than required, you may need to add a risk of spending a bit more time for coming to terms with your project than it would be in case of a perfect match.

Also, some candidates with an overgrown tools block may be not interested in test and/or domain part, because they just love their tools so much. For such candicates it makes sense to consider taking a different career path.

Sometimes you need to assess how feasibile a task is, or explain where complexity-related costs come from, or set priorities, or do something else along these lines. Then you may treat the white field (aka the overlapping areas) as a resource that is available to you.

In that case three big circles will show that your project is a little bit too heavy for your resource and you definitely need to do some risk assessment and re-planning.