In GMAW processes, bead geometry is a criterion to estimate welding quality. Bead geometry is affected by welding current, arc voltage, welding speed, shielding gas and so on. Thus the welding condition has to be selected carefully. In this paper, an experimental method for the selection of optimal welding condition was proposed in the root pass welding which was done along the GMA V-grooved butt weld joint. This method uses the response surface analysis in which the width and height of back bead were chosen as the quality variables of the weld. The overall desirability function, which is the combined desirability function for the two quality variables, was used as the objective function for getting the optimal welding condition. Through the experiments, the target values of the back bead width and the height were chosen as 4mm and 1mm respectively for the V-grooved butt weld joint. From a series of welding test, it was revealed that a uniform weld bead can be obtained by adopting the optimal welding condition which was determined according to the method proposed.