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To ensure your company releases a user-acceptable product and there are no critical issues before its launch, hiring a QA team would be the best and fastest option. What is QA team exactly, and how many people should you hire or outsource for your projects? In this article, we’ll tell you more about the key QA team members, their roles, and their goals. Keep reading to get helpful insights for your company!
What is a QA Team Meaning and What Functions it Serves
A quality assurance team is responsible for maintaining product development standards. QA teams make sure that the product, service, or functions customers get either meet or exceed their expectations. This, in return, enhances your brand reputation and increases customer loyalty.
One of the primary purposes of a QA team is to create a standardized set of practices aimed at enhancing product quality and improving the workflow. As a result, a company saves time, money, and effort trying to make its products, specifically digital ones, more responsive, intuitive, and smooth.
QA team members can focus on different tasks and types of tests, and you can hire or outsource new people based on your specific needs. Plus, you may need these or that experts depending on the project’s complexity, developers’ experience, and the number of teammates already involved in production. That’s why the team size usually varies from case to case.
Usually, outsourcing companies offer all kinds of specialists and can gather a team from scratch. If new tasks or issues occur, you’ll be able to adjust it due to your current needs. However, it’s crucial to pick a perfect QA team for your project and be deeply involved in the process yourself. Your product’s success depends on how you cooperate with your team as a client.
That’s why it’s essential to maintain consistent, regular communication with your team, clarify every point, and give suggestions for improving your team and product quality. Systematic communication ensures the team will complete a project just the way you wanted, or even exceed your expectations. To ensure this, try implementing internal UAT, organizing live sessions for clarifying project aspects, and running feedback discussions.
Giving more detail on what quality assurance teams do, here’s a list of main checks they run in the first place:
Simulation running
Among other QA team roles and responsibilities, the testing experts do simulation running. This is basically a representation of how software would work under given parameters. This is a necessary element of quality assurance as it allows your whole team to see if your product can work using the code and assets you want to use. Plus, with simulation, you can adjust how you want your app to work and bring more context to your requirements.
Software functionality checks
Functionality is what your digital product is capable of doing, and it’s essential for every business to ensure every element of your app is working the way it has to. That’s why QA testers run functionality checks: they go through every functional element of your product, report bugs, and provide recommendations on how to maintain each element and ensure timely function updates.
Design inspections
Design is also an integral part of your product’s success. That’s why design checks are among the main QA team responsibilities. They check if all the design elements show up properly on all the platforms and devices you’ve made your product run on, evaluate the intuitiveness, and make necessary adjustments if something needs improvement. QA experts either create reports or collaborate with the design team to fix issues together.
Some of the QA Team Goals Examples
Before hiring a QA team, you need to understand its value for your business. For instance, a digital product like a banking app or a medical appointment booking service needs to work flawlessly as it’s an essential part of everyone’s daily life. And that’s just a small portion of what professional quality assurance experts can help you with.
So, what about the main goals you can reach by hiring a QA team?
Define, report, and prevent bugs
The most obvious thing that comes to mind when you think of quality assurance is bug reports and prevention. That’s one of the key goals professional QA engineers and testers need to accomplish. They run all kinds of checks (smoke and regression, penetration, user acceptance, etc.) to ensure your digital product is ready for release and works smoothly and flawlessly.
Plus, QA teams help prevent and minimize any kinds of bugs in the future so that you won’t need to constantly update your app or software.
Ensure the quality standards alignment
Another essential aspect you should encounter while developing an app is compliance with all the rules and regulatory requirements. QA testers analyze your product and see if it has all prerequisites for the launch. Plus, they check if it follows all the security standards to ensure higher data and privacy safety both for your company and your users.
Develop unified practices
To save costs and time fixing the same bugs over and over, a QA team develops a set of standardized practices for completing regular checks, fixing bugs, updating apps, and all product-related aspects. It helps accelerate the overall development process and minimize the effort spent on repetitive mistakes in your product’s code and functionality.
Ensure great customer experience and satisfaction
The QA team isn’t just responsible for bug reports and ensuring quality standards. One of its core functions is also to enhance customer satisfaction and user experience with the product. That’s why QA testers usually run acceptance checks with your app’s end-users to gather feedback from the most interested parties and see what needs improving and what’s working well. This helps your team see if the product is ready for launch and offer it to your target audience.
The Core QA Team Structure
Now that you know more about the major responsibilities and functions of a quality assurance team, time to take a closer look at its main members. Sure, the team size can vary depending on your project and budget, but it’s best to have the following team members for proper QA test runs:
QA lead
QA leads can gather and manage the whole team from scratch or collaborate with the existing talent. If necessary, they can recruit and interview new QA engineers necessary for proper project completion. They also coordinate the whole team.
They’re also responsible for developing and finalizing a testing strategy, maintaining the whole QA process, and picking the best tools for performing these checks. If a QA lead joins an existing team, they’re eligible for optimizing their work and improving efficiency. These professionals take care of the final reporting and checks before approving the product for you. Finally, a QA team lead works closely with the dev team to enhance product development.
QA leads, as the critical team members, have to always be involved as full-time employees as they’re responsible for multiple tasks and must regularly monitor other processes and colleagues’ performance.
QA Engineer Manual
Manual QA engineers analyze test requirements for each project and create test cases. They also run these tests themselves and check your product’s functionalities, and detect bugs. If there are any, manual QA engineers report them and work together with the development team to fix and prevent (or minimize) them in the future.
For small-scale structures like simple mobile apps or websites, manual QA engineers can be involved as part-time employees. However, depending on the workload, they can join your teams full-time too. For larger projects like cryptocurrency platforms or eCommerce websites, manual engineers need to work full-time. Manual engineers should, in most cases, always be a part of your
QA team.
QA Engineer Automation
Automation testers support manual engineers and help automate routine tasks and operations to direct manual resources into more complex and relevant tasks — for example, those requiring a more creative approach or simply a human factor. Plus, depending on seniority, they develop test automation frameworks or contribute to existing ones.
To ensure proper communication with the rest of your team and being on the same page with developers, automation engineers set up a reporting portal. It helps promptly inform the team about existing bugs and start fixing them. Apart from that, automation engineers run relevant checks and create testing pipelines. Finally, they analyze and report test results together with detected issues.
Automation engineers usually work with middle- or large-scale projects such as crypto wallets, blockchain networks, eCommerce or retail platforms, payment providers, etc. In both cases, they should be employed full-time to ensure timely and effective project completion.
QA Engineer Performance
These QA team members analyze and define the key product performance metrics together with the team of architects. Performance engineers also design and create performance tests and testing strategies to analyze how your product work at different load volumes. Together with this, they run performance test scripts and provide reports on any issues that occur throughout these tests.
