Your employee retention rate is as important in QA because it can significantly impact the quality, effectiveness and speed of your software quality assurance efforts.
So, how do you approach retaining your QA employees? Or is the importance of staff retention not even on your radar?
The truth is, many employers recognize why employee retention is important. But, keeping employees from leaving so that your business can enjoy the advantages of employee retention rate is a problem more and more companies are experiencing.
Experiencing the value of employee retention starts at the hiring level. When you understand the importance of staff retention when building your QA team, you can control the impact of employee retention for years to come.
Hiring Practices that Boost Employee Retention Rate
At QASource, we take the 80/20 approach to software QA for measuring employee retention rate. Eighty percent of QA activity requires a knowledge of QA methodologies, QA tools and the ability to intelligently test software-worthwhile skills that deliver value of employee retention. The remaining 20% of employee responsibilities lies with the product and the team. QA engineers must know the product they are testing, understand how the people on their team collaborate and master the specific processes required for testing that particular software program. Without that specific knowledge and experience, a QA team may miss important test processes or waste a lot of time.
Let’s illustrate this concept of employee retention rate with a hypothetical scenario. Meet Jamie, a bright software tester who immediately plugs herself into your dev process. She has previous experience with your Test Link, Jira, and Jenkins systems, and starts logging bugs. In fact, Jamie logs bugs faster than any of the other QA engineers who have been in the company for the past six months. Your developers spend all week checking the bugs, only to discover that 99% of them were already logged issues.
Your company cannot enjoy the advantages of employee retention when your QA professionals are not in sync with your development process. In this example, Jamie understands how to carry out QA, but she didn’t add what we refer to as valuable QA.
Unlocking Valuable QA
In relation to employee retention rate, valuable QA takes place when the team has in-depth knowledge of the product, the team, the history and the processes. QA engineers who thoroughly integrate with developers, can log critical bugs and contribute to continuous integration-skills that help developers save time.
Why employee retention is important on your QA team is obvious - This QA engineer is a difficult professional to replace.
Measuring employee retention rate is all about time. And as we all know in business, time is money. Any new QA engineer taking this person’s place-even a capable QA engineer-needs time to fully integrate with the dev team, learn the team’s goals, understand the product’s current state and absorb the history of the QA testing process.
Benefits of High QA Retention
The longer a QA engineer can refine their skills on your team, the more benefits they can contribute towards the development cycle and QA process.
When a company has a high employee retention rate, QA engineers continually integrate and collaborate with your product and development teams. And the value of employee retention is apparent because it’s these QA engineers who:
- Earn the trust of developers: The development team relies on the testing results of your QA team in order to deploy a defect-free software application to market. Developers tend to trust QA engineers who have a long track record of solid testing the product and who are willing to problem solve alongside developers.
- Discover more relevant bugs: Measuring employee retention rate comes down to how quickly defects are detected. Established QA engineers familiar with your product better understand the expectations of the application, be it from the consumer side or from the backend. Because these professionals understand all processes for this software, they can uncover bugs sooner and with greater detail.
- Understand how the teams communicate: From product and development to business and marketing, every team communicates through different channels and with different jargon. A QA engineer who can speak easily across all teams involved within the development process can streamline the testing process as well as reduce frustration within communications.
- Introduce efficiencies in the process: This impact of employee retention is most noticeable when missing from your testing process. A QA engineer who is familiar with your product, teams and processes can see where more effective shortcuts can be implemented in order to fast track your development cycle.
- Identify test automation opportunities: Over time, a QA engineer knows which types of test cases, especially those executed across development cycles, are time consuming and prone to mistakes. Because of this history, this QA engineer can recommend specific tests that should be automated in order to create a more simplified testing process.
- Achieve development goals more efficiently: When it comes to employee retention rates, a strong QA engineer stays because an opportunity for development is available. And when a company invests in employee growth, a QA engineer is eager to achieve goals sooner and more comprehensively.
- Establish a reliable testing infrastructure: A QA engineer who plans to stay wants to create a testing structure designed for success. That’s because their growth at your company depends on the success of your product at market. Those who have worked for a long time with your business can offer their history and experience when reshaping your testing infrastructure.
- Enable faster releases: A strong QA engineer who thoroughly understands your development cycle can uncover faster, more effective ways to test and deliver results. The sooner that your QA team can report issues, the sooner your developers can resolve the defects.
This is why a high employee retention rate can turn good QA into great QA. There is a positive relationship between high employee retention and the quality, effectiveness and speed of software quality assurance efforts.
It is no wonder that large tech companies have allegedly agreed not to hire each other’s engineers. The turnover rate in Silicon Valley is estimated at 15% while the average turnover rate in India is 25%. These alarmingly high rates of attrition affect how well a QA engineer can learn the product, earn trust, gain efficiencies and deliver the most valuable QA possible.
At QASource, we work so hard at retaining our QA engineers. Because of this, our turnover rate is half the rate in Silicon Valley. In fact, our employee retention rate is currently at 93%. That means most of our QA engineers have years of experience with us in developing an extensive understanding of software applications and executing the most efficient testing practices across development cycles. Get in touch with a QASource expert today.
