To optimize makespan and reliability for workflow applications, most existing works use list heuristics rather than genetic algorithms (GAs) which can usually give better solutions. In addition, most existing GAs evolve a scheduling solution randomly, which may give invalid solutions or lead to slow convergence of the algorithm. In this paper, we define three heuristics for GAs to decide the priorities for a resource and a task dynamically. We propose Look-Ahead Genetic Algorithm (LAGA) to optimize both makespan and reliability for workflow applications. It uses a novel evolution and evaluation mechanism: the genetic operators evolve the task-resource mapping for a scheduling solution, while the solution’s task order is determined in the evaluation step using our new max-min strategy, which is specifically proposed for GAs. Our experiments show that LAGA can provide better solutions than existing list heuristics and evolve to better solutions more quickly than a traditional genetic algorithm.