How To Build a QA Team Through Strategic Management?

QA specialists use different testing methods to determine the quality of the product, report problems, and suggest improvements or fixes. Unfortunately, not all companies know how to build a QA team and what qualities its members should possess. To address this challenge, we have developed this guide with tips that will help you build a successful QA team in any of the above cases:

• you don’t have a team yet, and you need to create a QA department;
• you need to improve the performance of your existing QA specialists and establish cooperation between the teams;
• you already have a QA team, but it’s not doing as well as it could.

How to build a successful QA team from scratch: recruitment and onboarding

If you are wondering how to manage QA team but need experience, you can build it using outstaffing services. The advantage of outstaffing is that the agency has the necessary expertise and has already developed onboarding procedures to get you up and running as soon as possible. This method allows you to create your own QA processes that can be adjusted to meet changing requirements.

Roles and responsibilities of QA professionals

You must clearly assign QA roles to utilize and manage the team’s capabilities properly. It’s essential to consider the skills of each tester and understand who is best suited for which position. Currently, there are the following roles for QA engineers performing different duties in the testing team:

• Software Tester: Ensures comprehensive system-wide coverage through meticulous functional testing.
• Test Analyst: Strategizes, prioritizes, and documents test scenarios for robust evaluation.
• Test Automation Engineer: Champions efficiency by crafting automated tests with frameworks and APIs.
• Test Architect: Designs intricate testing frameworks and selects relevant tools (CI/CD pipelines, performance suites).
• Test Manager: Orchestrates test strategy, leads the QA team and optimizes processes for agility and objectives.

Motivating the QA team

Here are five management techniques to increase engagement, motivate testers, and promote good employee morale and successful work.

1. Encourage knowledge sharing

If employees feel like they are doing unproductive work, motivation drops. It is very important to share knowledge, encourage QA team members, and motivate each other to grow continuously.

2. Recognize credit

No one likes to be overlooked for their contribution to the overall endeavor. So, despite deadlines to meet, piles of tests to complete, urgent reports, and more, take time to praise, recognize, or reward employees for a well-done job. This recognition of successes will improve relationships with team members and create an environment where they feel valued and motivated as employees.

3. Use failures to learn

If you make a mistake, ensure your team members can avoid similar failures and learn from them. It is inherent in humans to make mistakes, and because you recognize your own mistakes, the team will not think less of you. On the contrary, the fact that you don’t hide them and help others learn from them is respectful.

4. Trust the team

Avoid micromanaging and show trust in your people. If you constantly look over your team members’ shoulders, they will feel that you don’t have faith in their ability to do the job. Monitoring progress and asking for status reports from new employees who have yet to prove their competence is natural. But don’t irritate the rest of your team by constantly questioning their work and giving directions about every little thing.

Micromanagement in testing makes team members unhappy. They feel like you don’t trust their skills or work ethic. Employees who are unhappy with this may leave for a better work environment. Hire qualified people and trust them.

5. Find out what motivates your team members

Each team member is an individual, and what is important to one may not interest another. Get to know your people and identify what motivates them. This will help build a system of incentives and rewards to inspire everyone. It’s often worth adding a competitive spirit and element of play to testing and QA, as healthy competition is good for business.

QA team performance metrics

There are many methods for measuring QA performance. However, performance metrics can be misleading or may not reveal the full picture, so it is important to interpret these numbers correctly. The following QA process metrics can give a general idea of the quality of the testing team’s work and evaluate it (although this list is neither definitive nor ideal):

• the number of bugs found in each release;
• the number of bugs found in staging vs. production;
• the severity of bugs found in the production environment;
• the number of bugs sent back for clarification;
• the ratio of the number of bug alerts to bugs fixed;
• time taken to resolve issues;
• total number of bugs;
• number of automated test cases executed and  created;
• test cycle execution time;
• evaluation of autotest coverage of product functionality.

These are just some ways to evaluate the QA team’s performance, and it’s important to consider the context of the results. If a metric alarms you, find out how to determine how serious the problem is.

Scaling the QA team

Leaders of QA teams in growing organizations eventually need to hire more specialists. Expanding the testing team can be daunting, so you should make sure it’s really necessary. Here are some common cases when you need to add to your team members and tips on hiring a good QA engineer.

1. Lack of technical knowledge

If a department lacks technical knowledge and expertise, it is necessary to expand the QA team, as technical knowledge can greatly improve productivity. For example, adding just one QA engineer with  automation experience will quickly automate many routine tasks, allowing the team to focus on more complex tasks.

2. Everything is automated to the max

On the other hand, if you’ve automated everything you can and there’s still too much manual work, it’s time to bring in new specialists. When automation has already exhausted its potential,  additional manpower can help complete manual tasks efficiently.

An outsourced QA service is better when you only occasionally need extra help. It will allow you to work efficiently during peak periods without adding additional team members with nothing to do the rest of the time.

3. A team member leaves

When a specialist leaves the QA team, you need to find a replacement as soon as possible to maintain balance in the team and preserve individual roles and responsibilities. To avoid falling into a labor-intensive recruitment and hiring process, you can easily hire an additional employee through outstaffing services.

Introduction of QA lead position in the team

To effectively manage distributed testing teams, you need a reliable team lead. Ensuring this person has the necessary skills to lead a team of testers is essential. A good team lead should have leadership skills and extensive QA knowledge and should be able to handle the following responsibilities:

• recruit and ensure the onboarding and integration of new professionals in the team.
• help team members develop their skills, implement training and assessment programs;
• costs labor estimate and ROI;
• develop test plans and infrastructure;
• collect and analyze product quality metrics;
• create, improve, and scale quality assurance processes.

The ability to lead a team is not just about having the right technical skills. You need someone who understands how to be a team leader, inspires respect, and manages conflict.

Conclusion

Quality assurance is a part of development, and a managed QA team helps create better products that outperform competitors’ products. Various methods of motivating a QA team, such as gamifying workflows or setting goals, will help you become an effective manager.

We hope these tips and processes will teach you how to build a QA team from scratch that gets the most out of your quality assurance department.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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