How to Scale QA without Scaling Your QA Team

Doing QA well is tough, even for the most innovative teams. Effectively scaling good QA is even tougher. The trickiest piece of this puzzle is designing a QA strategy that meets the needs of a speedy development team --while simultaneously adapting QA to support ever-changing business goals.

However, it's not impossible to ship high-quality code quickly and tie your QA strategy to business goals at the same time. Our CIO, Derek Choy, recently sat down for a webinar to discuss how the key to doing QA well and scaling it along with your organization's growth, lies in knowing how to scale QA processes without scaling your QA team.

3 Things to Consider Before Scaling Your QA Team

While there are several ways to approach scaling QA, growing a team of people is very common. Keep in mind that growing your team may not be the best option for your unique organization at this time.

Derek emphasized considering these three downsides that come along with growing a QA team when you're strategizing scaling software quality:

1. Bigger teams are harder to manage: People management resources are necessary to make a QA team successful, and the more people there are on the team the harder it is to manage. Having a big team means that more of your time is spent on making each team member successful with execution, which means less time is available for you to focus on strategic initiatives.
2. Inflexibility for scheduling and capacity: People are inflexible. And for good reason! People have lives outside of work. Scaling your QA team can make managing QA on the weekends and at night a bottleneck to continuous delivery. While offshore teams are an option, it takes a long time to find people and get them up-to-speed on execution. Additionally, offshore teams often come with management difficulties.
3. Growing a QA team can be expensive: Recruiting and onboarding new talent cost a pretty penny --as does attrition. Headcount also does not come cheap. Scaling your team can be one of the most expensive ways to approach scaling QA.

Don't jump the gun on growing your QA team when scaling your QA strategy. Instead, be strategic with hiring and consider other options to QA strategy scaling success.

Leverage Tools to Automate the QA Process to Scale Your QA Strategy

Leverage as many useful tools as you can to improve the execution of QA as well as the QA process. - Derek Choy

Implementing tools to automate your QA process is an effective way to scale QA without scaling your QA team. A QA solution built for a fast-moving development process will be more affordable than growing headcount. While giving your team everything it needs to bring the QA process up to speed with your organization's growing business goals.

QA strategy and execution solutions like the Rainforest 3.0 Platform empower teams to take a strategic approach to software quality and automate the QA process. By filling the QA coverage gap, the Rainforest 3.0 platform increases product quality, customer satisfaction and revenue goals.

Learn the Role of Test Automation in Successful QA Scaling Strategies

I think test automation should be a part of every QA strategy, but not all of it. - Derek Choy

Automating QA testing can speed up quality feedback and accelerate time to software improvements, but it's not without limitations. Test automation contains a range of hidden costs, from hiring engineering talent to script and maintain tests, to maintaining the environments automated tests run in.

The key to successful QA test automation lies in being strategic with which tests you decide to automate. Remember that every organization is unique, so there is no one-size-fits-all answer to how much to automate. To learn more about the role of test automation in successfully scaling your QA strategy and scaling best practices, listen on-demand to Scaling QA without Scaling Your Team.