QASource Blog

Understanding key management skills required to achieve an efficient, productive QA team is essential to the success of projects. In today’s world, we are changing our approach towards Agile & Scrum processes, which focus on not just executing test cases at the end of a test cycle, but communicating risks throughout the software development lifecycle. This requires QA testers to be involved with various parts of the team including business analysts and developers at each level. Being able to manage the QA teams is crucial for an organization’s success. Here are some key skills needed to manage your QA team effectively.

Without high-quality defect tracking tools, monitoring software bugs is impossible. No engineer can track each and every defect in his or her head, nor with a single spreadsheet. Bug tracking allows teams to focus on priority issues that directly affect the quality of the software, and communicate about them more effectively.

In an Agile environment, development and QA testing services are tightly woven, resulting in an efficient testing process and ultimately, a high-quality product. A good test case is the foundation of this “hand-in-hand” relationship. To create a test case, the objectives of the product are translated into test conditions. These conditions describe an input, action, or event, along with an expected response or output. If this expected output is achieved, the test case has verified the proper function of the product.

Today, software engineering is defined by speed. As companies strive to achieve weekly, or even daily, releases, QA and development teams must combine their efforts to deliver a high-quality product on schedule. This is not always easy, as both teams contribute differently to the project. Developers are concerned with developing and delivering the product on time, and QA engineers are tasked with testing and ensuring its quality. Oftentimes, these teams are completely separate units. With proper coaching and guidance, you can unite both teams in pursuit of a common goal: a solid product release that meets customer requirements.

Over the years we have been asked, and have answered, nearly every possible question about QA. The one recurring question that no one can answer clearly is, “What is the right mix of QA engineers to development engineers?” We admit it: we don’t have a firm answer, either. The ideal ratio of QA to dev depends on several key factors, each of which may change on a project-to-project basis. For this reason, we recommend starting with a small team and scaling up or down as needed.

Our clients tell us they paid a lot of attention to company culture when they were comparing offshore QA companies. They were convinced, based on prior experience, that culture is the critical difference in companies that integrate successfully with the development team and consistently find critical bugs. No amount of tools, methodologies, nor bug reporting processes can overcome a weak company culture when outsourcing QA. Nor can these resources contribute as significantly as company culture to the motivation of the QA engineers doing the work.