How to Set Up a Proper QA Process in Your Company?

Whether you are launching a startup or being overwhelmed by software quality issues with your existing product, you need to investigate how to implement a QA process in your organization.

In this article, we will evaluate in-depth the essential approaches to establishing the QA process, benefits, disadvantages, and challenges of each strategy, as well as detailed steps and best practices of the QA process and procedures.

At UTOR, we help software companies establish quality assurance from scratch and optimize existing processes to bring their product quality to the next level.

Recognize The Importance of a QA Process and Assess the Risks of Its Neglecting 

The quality assurance process is a systematic activity conducted by software testing specialists to determine whether a product or service meets specified quality requirements and criteria.

Disregarding the proper QA process affects the product quality which includes (but is not limited to) the following risks:

1. Software defects drive away users and leave them unsatisfied with your product. As a result, customer loyalty drops;
2. A high amount of negative reviews increases the possibility of reputation losses; 
3. Poor product quality leads to trust issues and potential troubles with investors;
4. You undermine your sales efforts since new customers intend to use your product first, but then find out that it doesn’t fill their needs and leave;
5. Old features might stop working when the development team introduces new changes;
6. Quality issues shift the team’s focus: developers work on fixing bugs instead of implementing new features and improvements;
7. QA process is performed only by project managers, developers, designers, or other team members without involving QA professionals;
8. Quality issues slow down the deployment to production since the development team can’t implement new features because of product defects.

On the other hand, introducing an aligned and structured QA process can bring major improvements to your business. It increases your product’s overall quality, which helps to grow customer satisfaction and loyalty. Moreover:

• Your team can focus on product improvements and implementing new features;
• Satisfied users will leave less complaints or even none whatsoever, which reduces the pressure for the customer support team;
• High product quality will decrease any doubts about the possibility of product failure;
• Proper QA process will lead to project cost reduction since preventing defects is cheaper than fixing them later.

Build Up a Software QA Team

At the start, you can engage a qualified and experienced QA specialist to audit your current state of QA and create the vision of the quality assurance process at your company. The next step would be to hire an experienced QA Team Lead to assist you in choosing the right members of a future QA team.

The set of specific QA roles and responsibilities highly depends on your software product features and business goals. In general, you might need the following specialists for your project:

• QA Engineer;
• Test Automation Engineer;
• Test Analyst;
• Test Architect;
• Test Manager;
• QC Engineer.

Choose an Approach to Set Up a QA Process 

Build an In-house Team

Your company can implement the QA process by hiring QA specialists and expanding the existing team. Before creating an in-house department of QA specialists, make sure that your company has enough resources to support a productive working environment for new employees. Also, you’ll need a long-term project to work on. Otherwise, it won’t be cost-effective.

Advantages

• You can establish your own corporate culture within your team.
• QAs and developers work closely, hence communication is more streamlined.
• Hiring highly skilled QA specialists will increase the level of expertise within your company.
• You can save time on briefing outsourcing companies since your in-house team will be familiar with the specific requirements of your project.
• Your CTO can keep better control of the whole testing process.
• Reduced risk of a confidential information breach.

Disadvantages

• High costs of maintaining an in-house QA team. It includes recruiting, training,  establishing, and supporting the effective workflow of a full set of QA specialists.
• Working on numerous projects at once and adhering to rigid deadlines often makes in-house QA teams reluctant to adopt new testing scenarios that aren’t covered by the test cases.
• Considerable budgets for proper QA tools for different testing types.
• Your internal team’s expertise might be insufficient for setting us an entire QA process, so you’ll need to hire more specialists.

Challenges

• Building a complete QA department. Even the most qualified QA engineer can’t establish the quality assurance process alone.
• Recruiting specialists with the required skill-set might be time-consuming and take more time than expected to find the right candidate.
• Creating a productive workflow, choosing between a bunch of testing approaches to fit your specific project. 

2. Use the QA Consulting Services

Use the QA Consulting Services

Your company may consider referring to a QA expert or a consulting company with solid domain knowledge to build a software QA strategy and launch a QA process. At UTOR, we help companies analyze their current QA state, share our knowledge and expertise, set up a full-cycle QA process, perform a quality assurance audit and provide ongoing support.

Advantages

• External experts will give you a fresh look at your QA process and uncover potential gaps that might not have been visible before.
• You can still maintain independence in your strategy and operations to decide whether to accept recommendations or not.

Disadvantages

• Your company still needs to invest money in expanding your team, purchasing QA tools, and maintaining workflow.

Challenges

• To get comprehensive QA consulting services, it is crucially important to find a company with appropriate expertise. UTOR has more than five years of experience in building QA departments and providing detailed planning and support for QA process implementation.

Outsource QA Specialists or Hire Dedicated Team

According to the QA outsourcing model, quality assurance companies can provide you with one testing specialist or the whole QA department, depending on your particular project needs. The UTOR’s team is fully equipped with expertise, tools, and infrastructure to help businesses achieve their software quality goals.

Advantages

• The essential benefit of QA outsourcing is that it allows cutting costs by saving on hiring, training, and managing an in-house QA team.
• You get access to a broad range of skilled specialists and industry expertise.
• There is no need to spend time on hiring and onboarding QA specialists.
• An outsourcing company can provide you with the team size you require for your project and can quickly downsize or expand it.
• Effective collaboration between internal development team and dedicated QA specialists.
• Dedicated teams have access to the latest testing tools and technologies to conduct quality assurance on all software testing stages. 
• QA outsourcing allows you to focus on core business processes and improve your software features while a dedicated team handles the testing process.

Disadvantages

• You need to conduct a detailed briefing: the outsourcing QA team is not familiar with your product from the very beginning. Therefore, you must invest your time to instruct the testing company about your business and project objectives before they take on your project.

Challenges

• Risk of a confidentiality breach. To avoid this, sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) with the QA outsourcing company before passing any confidential data to them.
• Finding a trustworthy partner might be a challenge. Make sure to choose a recognized QA partner with proven positive reviews. For instance, UTOR was named the top b2b company by Clutch analysts.

Align The QA Process With Your Business Goals

The QA strategy highly depends on the current development stage of your product. For instance, the main goal of startup projects at the early development stages is to validate their business idea. It doesn’t make sense for them to write the complete testing documentation and automate the manual testing process since they only aim for a faster time-to-market with the minimum viable product (MVP).

After the product idea is validated, you can make the first QA process steps on a production stage and start building a basis of your QA strategy – a long prospective concept of the product quality for 1-2 years. According to your company’s vision, a QA Analyst can create a testing strategy, prepare documentation, and design test cases according to the present functionality. After that, you can involve manual and automation QA Engineers to perform testing.

While your software continues to expand its features and complexity, test cases need to be reviewed and rewritten regularly. You may also draw on a DevOps specialist to speed up your testing process.

Follow Steps to Successfully Implement the QA Process

The QA process flow is determined by the development method adopted at your company. The following steps may vary depending on whether you use iterative or incremental development. For instance, Scrum might include regression tests and Kanban usually includes acceptance tests, which you might not need in other methodologies.

1. Audit your current state of QA process to identify issues and bottlenecks with experienced QA Manager or mentor;
2. Create a long-term strategy of your QA processes and methodologies with your QA Manager;
3. QA Analyst investigates the overall project needs and software requirements;
4. QA Manager plans the scope of work and counts the estimates, sets up the deadlines, as well as chooses testing types, methods, software testing metrics, and tools. Later, QA Manager assigns roles in a team, creates a test strategy and a test plan;
5. QA Engineer executes manual tests and reports defects using bug tracking tools;
6. Involve QA Automation Engineer to conduct the test automation if it covers the ROI (Return of Investment);
7. QA Engineer executes regression tests (after the bugs are fixed) and release tests.

Use QA Process Best Practices 

• Decide who owns quality in your team. Select a person or a team to be responsible for developing a QA strategy and setting testing priorities.
• Prioritize testing tasks. It will help to avoid bottlenecks in a software development lifecycle.
• Implement QA according to your development model. In Agile, the QA process should start simultaneously with development.
• Establish your process based on a strategy.
• First, use manual testing and only after that apply automation.
• Report every single defect using bug tracking tools.
• Be open to new technologies. Always search for new tools and solutions available to make the QA process more efficient.

Wrapping Up

Setting up the QA process without accessing solid domain expertise might add up costs to your development budget and put your software quality at risk. Whether you choose to build an in-house team or outsource QA services, consulting with industry experts will benefit your business and provide a good ROI.