How Many QA Does Your Project Need?

Determining the number of Quality Assurance (QA) Analysts required to test a product depends on several key factors, including the desired speed and quality of the finished product, as well as the expertise of the QA. It's important to clarify what we mean by "QA Analyst." For the purposes of this discussion, let's assume we're referring to basic manual testers who are proficient in conducting standard testing procedures.

Factors Influencing the Number of QA Testers Needed

Project Complexity:

Complex projects with intricate functionalities require more thorough testing. As the complexity increases, so does the need for a larger QA team to cover various scenarios and ensure comprehensive test coverage.

Development Methodology:

Agile and DevOps methodologies emphasize continuous testing and integration. This often necessitates a higher tester-to-developer ratio to keep up with the rapid development cycles and frequent releases.

Quality Standards:

Higher quality standards and stricter regulatory requirements demand more rigorous testing. Industries such as healthcare, finance, and aerospace often require additional QA resources to meet compliance standards.

Automation:

The level of test automation in your project can significantly impact the number of manual testers needed. Effective automation reduces the manual testing workload, allowing the QA team to focus on more complex and exploratory testing tasks.

Expertise of QA:

The skill level and experience of your QA testers play a crucial role. Senior testers with extensive experience can manage more testing scenarios and identify issues more efficiently than junior testers, potentially reducing the overall number of testers needed.

Getting down to the brass tax:

Considering all of these factors, on average, the ratio of QA to devs is 1:3. But what can do we do improve this ratio? Can it be more? The answer is yes, and heres how...

The Role of Quality Advocates

Traditional QA Analysts primarily focus on identifying bugs after they've been created. While this is essential, it doesn't contribute to preventing issues from arising in the first place. This is where the concept of Quality Advocates comes into play. Quality Advocates go beyond mere testing; they focus on comprehensive quality assurance practices that encompass the principles of QA 2.0, which emphasizes the following eight pillars of Quality Assurance: requirements quality, design quality, code quality, quality control, process quality, infrastructure quality, resource quality, and knowledge quality.

Requirements Quality:

Ensuring the requirements are of high quality involves advocating for best practices for requirements documentation, storage, and universal team access. This also includes practices that ensure the team understands the requirements. A Quality Advocate should identify test cases early and review those test cases with developers and product owners. This provides the opportunity to clarify any issues and remove any miscommunications in the requirements before code is written.

Design Quality:

Ensuring the design of the software follows best practices and produces a product that can be tested easily and efficiently. A Quality Advocate would push to incorporate industry standard practices and principles in the design of the software, such as using established coding patterns and frameworks. This also involves providing input on the design of the software in terms of testability, which prepares the way for effective and efficient testing.

Code Quality:

Advocating for the adoption of industry standard coding practices such as writing unit tests and maintaining an agreed upon level of coverage, pair programming, peer review, unit testing, and tracking code in a source control management (SCM) system. Maintaining automation coverage across the critical path and regression test plans also falls under Code Quality. The focus of Code Quality is to ensure the code itself is of high quality.

Quality Control (QC):

Quality Control is what is most commonly known as testing, traditionally the sole focus of most QA organizations. Ensuring what was asked for by the product team was delivered by the engineering team accurately. If Requirements Quality, Design Quality, and Code Quality have been implemented properly, QC is just a formality because bugs have been actively prevented. QC is just running through the checklist, so to speak, of the requested functionality. This is the last stage in the SDLC where bugs should ever be found. Any bugs found after this stage indicate there is process improvement needed in one of the eight pillars.

Process Quality:

Every team can improve on what they are doing. It is up to Quality Advocates to push for this improvement to happen. Most importantly, the Quality Advocate should partner with their team to propose right-fit process improvements, moving the team towards a Zero Bug organization through the implementation of the eight QA 2.0 pillars.

Infrastructure Quality:

The stability of all environments is important. Ensuring you have a strong and stable production environment is crucial to maintain revenue and ensure the company continues to get new customers and keeps existing ones. An unstable production environment directly impacts the bottom line. A Quality Advocate should push to implement best practices in infrastructure, such as load balancing, scalable environments, adequate hardware, and comprehensive monitoring. Infrastructure Quality is also important in non-production environments to maintain efficient execution of daily responsibilities. Stable development, QA, and staging environments enable the team to execute any building, testing, and automation throughout the day without interruption. Ensure that none of the environments cross-talk with each other. This is an important aspect of Infrastructure Quality that is often overlooked. Keeping environments cleanly delineated is critical to the reliability of any testing done in non-production environments. If the non-prod environments are not similarly structured like production, you cannot rely on the testing done in those environments. A Quality Advocate must push for the implementation of quality environments to ensure testing can proceed without delay and to ensure testing is reliable.

Resource Quality:

Are the right people taking on the right roles within the team? Are those individuals properly trained, continually learning, and continually growing? Are they trained in the software and applications the team is working with? Are the teams properly balanced with the right mix of developers, product, and QA? These are the questions a Quality Advocate should be asking of their team to ensure the team is running as effectively and efficiently as possible. If any of those are a “no,” then the Quality Advocate should be highlighting this to the team and asking for change.

Knowledge Quality:

It is incredibly important to know what should be happening and how the application is expected to function. Even more so, it is foundational to all other work that we know the “Business Why.” The Business Why is the reason things are the way they are in a company. Why do we have this set of software? Why do we run these reports? Why do we provide this service to our customers? All of these questions and more inform the work we do in all other pillars. So it is important to know and to continually add to and update documentation to maintain a high level of knowledge quality.

By implementing these principles, Quality Advocates can significantly enhance the development process. This approach not only improves the ratio of QA to developers but also helps in preventing bugs, leading to faster and more cost-effective releases of products to production. With Quality Advocates, you can increase the QA to developer ratio to 1:4. With the popularization of efficiency tools through AI, this ratio is on it's way to upwards of 1:6.

Case Study: Implementing Quality Advocacy

Consider a healthcare software company transitioning from a traditional QA approach to a Quality Advocacy model. Initially, the company faced frequent bug reports, delayed releases, and high post-release defect rates. By integrating Quality Advocates into their teams, the company experienced several positive outcomes:

Reduced Defect Rates:

Proactive measures taken by Quality Advocates led to a noticeable decline in defects found during testing phases.

Faster Releases:

With fewer defects and streamlined processes, the company achieved faster release cycles.

Improved Team Collaboration:

Quality Advocates fostered better communication and collaboration between QA and development teams, leading to quicker issue resolution and a more cohesive development environment.

Higher Customer Satisfaction:

The overall improvement in product quality resulted in higher customer satisfaction and fewer support issues post-release.

Conclusion

In summary, while the number of QA Analysts needed can vary based on multiple factors, the base ratio to shoot for is 1:3. Incorporating Quality Advocates into your team can streamline your QA process, prevent issues, and enhance overall product quality, enabling a 1:4 ratio. Multiply this with the power of efficiency tools, the industry is headed for an era of a 1:6 ratio. This strategic investment in quality assurance enables teams to deliver high-quality products more efficiently and affordably. With the right approach and tools, it's possible to achieve a highly effective QA-to-developer ratio, ensuring your projects meet the highest standards of quality while striking a good balance between team size and budget.