Today, the focus of IT projects has shifted from their technical implementation to the final quality of products, provided by the Quality Assurance team. The Coherent Market Insights forecast for the QA industry development confirms this.
- According to the study, the segment’s capitalization should reach more than $90 billion by 2030. It means that the CAGR will reach 13% in 6 years. Moreover, new players, such as QA teams, will emerge, and the number of service offerings will increase as well.
However, not all the new teams on the market can offer truly expert services, and full-time specialists do not always have enough experience to perform certain tasks.
Learn more about the creation and administration of a Quality Assurance team in the context of:
- Building a strong QA team structure.
- Defining roles and responsibilities within the team.
- Streamlining QA workflows for efficiency.
- Fostering collaboration between developers and QA.
- Motivating and retaining QA talent.
Market analysis and analysis of best practices will help you to properly organize your QA team and achieve the best results during product development.
Briefly About the Role of the Quality Assurance Team
What is a QA team in general? In short, it is a group of specialists who perform a set of tasks to ensure your product is of the highest possible quality and fully meets the needs of the business, the market, and the user.
Classical QA roles, responsibilities, and goals for the Quality Assurance team are:
- Analysis of the industry, business, and audience. Preparing reports on the best development solutions.
- Development of realistic user and business cases to ensure the QA team covers scenarios that real users and businesses are likely to encounter.
- Forming a list of potential risks and algorithms for overcoming them while working on the project.
- Prioritization of product testing. Determining hypothetical results.
- Selection, deployment, configuration, and implementation of specialized testing tools.
- Setting metrics and KPIs to control productivity and work efficiency.
- Process automation and manual product testing according to established criteria.
- Preparation of reports, documentation, instructions, and technical maps for the customer.
- Participate in code reviews to ensure it is of good quality, scalable, and easy to maintain.
- Verify bug fixes to ensure that all critical issues are fixed and not migrated between product iterations.
This is what a QA engineer does most often, although their activities may differ slightly depending on the project. At the same time, the end result should be 100% satisfactory to the client and the product’s audience.
The Advantages of a Properly Built Quality Assurance Team
A properly organized Quality Assurance team structure is a strong basis for your project. Thanks to it, you can achieve your goals and ensure the following:
- A reliable product version that is easy to maintain and scale.
- Compliance of functionality, design, and productivity with business and customer requirements.
- Manageability of processes, fast deployment of iterations, and product quality control.
If you organize the work of your QA team properly, you can get rid of typical problems of its management.
Steps to Follow to Build a QA Team
If, for some reason, you do not want to involve third parties in the work on the product, you can try to assemble your own Quality Assurance team.
To do this, you should perform several steps:
- Define the goals.
- Build a test strategy according to the goals.
- Choose the proper skill set (both hard and soft skills).
- Set up the rules and expectations.
- Evaluate your team.
Let’s consider each of them in more detail.
Define the Goals
Before creating a Quality Assurance team, you need to define what you want to achieve with this team. Firstly, study your business needs and goals, and then look for talents that ensure their expertise.
It can be done with the help of an in-depth analysis of your product and determining target audience demands. Set the objectives you want to achieve with the help of QA.
Build a Test Strategy According to the Goals
Before hiring a Quality Assurance team, you need to build a strategy describing how to achieve your goals step-by-step. It should include not only a project roadmap but also a risk management program and long-term plans.
In this way, you will cover the needs of both development and future scaling of your product in advance with the help of quality assurance, testing, modeling of user behavior, and forecasting.
Choose Proper Skill Set (Both Hard and Soft Skills)
The most important characteristic of a Quality Assurance team is precisely the awareness of the performers in various models and types of testing, tools, principles, and algorithms of cooperation with the rest of the teams.
Pay attention not only to Hard but also to Soft Skills, previous experience working on products of your type, portfolio, feedback from employers, and practical skills of specialists.
Set up the Rules and Expectations
Workflow organization is an invariable attribute of the professional formation of the Quality Assurance team. You should literally immediately convey to the executors their duties, project goals, and your expectations.
Establish acceptance criteria, develop onboarding for QA, and involve a QA team in all development processes to give them more context.
At the same time, you need to receive feedback to improve processes. In particular, initiatives that can optimize operations or increase the efficiency and productivity of work on the project.
Evaluate Your Team
To understand whether the Quality Assurance team responds to your expectations, you should establish certain standards against which you can evaluate the progress of the QA project.
It can involve reviewing their testing processes, bug reports, and retrospectives. This will increase the motivation and effectiveness of performers.
Challenges CTOs Face While Setting Up a QA Team
If you do not hire a self-managed team but form your own quality department structure, you can make critical mistakes that will lead to the failure of the project. Here are a few of them:
- Not all CTOs may be familiar with every aspect of the QA workflow.
- QA processes require deeper expertise in testing processes and practices.
- Choosing proper QA tools.
- Anxiety that development processes on different projects may collapse.
- Slow deployment to production due to lack of automated testing.
- Lack of internal resources.
- Onboarding and training for new quality assurance engineers.
- Ensuring comprehensive testing.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these challenges.
CTO Don’t Know the Full Cycle of How QA Should Work
Technical directors see the development process as complex. Therefore, they do not pay enough attention to its individual components, which can ultimately shift the focus of teams to less critical things. In particular, 45% of companies do not use CI/CD for integration testing, which leads to organizational and technical problems.
The Utor team can provide your project with an experienced Quality Assurance team, which will perform direct duties, and help responsible managers with process administration.
QA Processes Require Deeper Expertise in Testing Processes and Practices
Often, the full-time team stops noticing QA’s blind spots. In such cases, a third party will help you reveal the inaccuracies and problems of the current QA process, e.g., improperly constructed reporting operations, as happens in 19.16% of organizations deploying QA for projects.
Utor specialists can help you with quality assurance and ongoing training of existing personnel in work methods, tools, etc.
Choosing Proper QA Tools
There is no perfect tool set for work, no matter how much we dream about it. Different QA tasks require specific tools, frameworks, and work environments. It turns out that teams spend about 10.4% of their work time on deploying and configuring test environments, and an additional 7.8% on patching tests. This could be prevented by using the right tools.
The Quality Assurance team at Utor uses a full range of tools to test products against business and audience needs, their technical components, features, performance, and more.
Anxiety That Development Processes on Different Projects May Collapse
The planning and organization of QA processes does not always go according to plan, which can really lead to certain problems with product quality in the future, or simply reduce the effectiveness of testing. And this is the case of 28.7% of companies that do not have an organized infrastructure of preliminary research.
Utor specialists can help you estimate the scope of work and properly organize the workflow, covering all aspects of the project with checks and setting the correct KPI for the Quality Assurance team.
Slow Deployment to Production Due to Lack of Automated Testing
The lack of automation or its incorrect priorities can reduce the speed of the team’s work on the project or completely stop the development process. For example, 73.8% of teams do it, automating everything at the same time.
Utor experts deploy the product testing process even before the beginning of the development cycle and also cover all critical components with automated verification algorithms.
Lack of Internal Resources
Sometimes, a full-time Quality Assurance team structure is not enough, or it lacks specific skills, which leads to a decrease in productivity, omission of errors, etc. For example, in 53.9% of cases, there are 1–3 QA specialists per 10 developers, which is sometimes not enough to fully cover the needs of the project.
The problem can be solved, for example, through cooperation with Utor. This is one of those moments when hiring QA is the most effective solution for improving team performance.
Onboarding and Training for New QAs
Another challenge of organizing your own Quality Assurance team is training new performers. If we talk about the role of Test Engineers, their share is about 51.4%, and 43.9% of them are employed by large companies. This applies particularly to permanent groups of testers, although similar concerns occur even in startups.
To overcome this, you will need to create an internal knowledge base, a hierarchy where mentors will pass on the experience. Or you can cooperate with Utor and not face the issues or training specialists at all.
Ensuring Comprehensive Testing
For various reasons, the Quality Assurance team may lose focus on critical moments of the project or simply not have time to cover all its aspects due to a lack of specialists, the complexity of the task, etc. However, about 71% of companies practice comprehensive preparation for testing at the beginning of each sprint.
In such cases, you will need external help. For example, Utor experts, who will strengthen your team or fully cover the project’s need, providing it with comprehensive support and testing.
Let’s Summarize
Formation of an effective and flexible Quality Assurance team can be a daunting task if you don’t have experience with similar processes and don’t understand the value of QA for your product.
However, you can still try to build the right quality department structure if you follow the steps described in the article:
- Define the goals.
- Build a test strategy according to the goals.
- Choose the proper skill set (both hard and soft skills).
- Set up the rules and expectations.
- Evaluate your team.
However, if you want to save some time and money by getting qualified help instead, then we have an interesting offer for you.
Provide your product with the highest level of support and service from the Utor’s Quality Assurance team. Contact our manager for a preliminary consultation and the beginning of a long, fruitful cooperation!
FAQ
What do quality assurance teams do?
Quality Assurance teams are responsible for ensuring the quality of products or services in companies. They play an important role in ensuring the high quality of digital products or services, as well as in maintaining the company’s reputation and customer satisfaction.
What is the role of Quality Assurance?
Here are some key aspects of the QA role:
- Helps prevent defects by developing QA strategies and procedures.
- Defines the process of testing products or services to identify possible problems and defects.
- Analyzes product or service requirements and ensures they meet quality standards.
- Monitors production processes to implement corrections and improvements.
- Trains staff on quality requirements and QA procedures.
And these are just some processes inherent in a QA professional.
What are the goals of a Quality Assurance team?
The main goal is to ensure that products or services meet established quality standards. Specialists also focus on avoiding defects and issues by implementing QA strategies and procedures. They also have to make sure that the products or services meet the requirements of the law and quality standards, the needs of the business, and its audience.
How do you structure a QA team?
The main components of the QA team structure may include:
- QA Manager. Responsible for leading the entire QA team, establishing QA strategies and procedures, and collaborating with other departments.
- QA Engineers. Perform product or service testing, identify defects, and develop test scenarios and automated tests.
- Quality Analysts. Responsible for analyzing product quality, collecting and analyzing quality data, identifying trends, and improving processes.
- Testers (Testers). Perform testing of functionality, interaction and other aspects of products or services.
- Automation Engineers. We specialize in test automation to increase the efficiency and speed of the testing process.
- QA Lead. Manages a group of QA engineers, assigns tasks, and is responsible for planning and execution of testing.
Depending on the project, its needs, the composition of the team and the number of performers may change.
Why is a QA tester required on a software development team?
To ensure high product quality by detecting errors, defects, and deficiencies before release to the market. They are responsible for performing a variety of tests, identifying issues with product functionality and interoperability, and ensuring that the software meets user requirements and established quality standards.
At which stage might a Quality Assurance team be called in to help?
A Quality Assurance team can be called upon to assist at various stages of software development, including: project planning; design and analysis of requirements, development, testing and testing; product release. The earlier you deploy QA, the more thoroughly you can debug the product before launch.
