Thinking About When to Make Your First QA Team Hire?

Whether you’re a startup or a growing company, ensuring the quality of your product is crucial. However, knowing when to make your first Quality Assurance (QA) hire and choosing the right approach can be tough. Today we’ll explore different options for managing QA—hiring a dedicated team, outsourcing, having engineers handle it, or partnering with a testing service. 

Any of the previous options are fine as long as your team and budget can cater to it. Sometimes we feel that choosing one may be easier, however, it may be difficult to bring this into your teams as existing members would need to expect some change. Now let’s look at the pros and cons of each approach to help you make an informed decision.

Hiring a Dedicated QA Team

When planning for a QA project, it’s vital to understand how long the project will run. If it’s a small project hiring a new QA team might not be the best choice. Also, consider all future implementations and requirements to see if this project would be a BAU. Once vital aspects are clear hiring a specific QA team would make sense. There are two options here too:

1. Make an internal team with the QA that is available, this could be permanent staff or contractors.
2. Hire a team from scratch, which could have its benefits and downfalls. 

Having in-house expertise is great if the organization can spin this up, as having a dedicated testing team means building it all in-house and they would understand the company and its products inside out. Also, communication will be easier as the testers would already know the engineers in the teams and could have a faster resolution to issues and better collaboration. Finally, the teams have complete control of the testing approach and processes end to end including knowledge of the right tools and methodologies. 

On the other side, training and retaining testing staff can be more expensive as other projects might end up hiring more testers for their projects. This could be a big disadvantage for a startup or companies with limited budgets, as it takes time and resources to manage a team and the whole infrastructure around it. Also if the product your team is working on grows then more testers may be required and scaling up could be a challenge on its own.

Best For

• Companies with complex products that require deep, continuous testing.
• Organizations with sufficient budget and resources to invest in a dedicated QA team.

Outsourcing QA

Having a strategic partner that will be there for any roles that become available is a good option always to have, However, this does come at a high cost and the organization needs a sufficient budget. Nowadays there are different options in terms of outsourcing, whether offshore, onshore, or nearshore. 

The benefits of this are more cost-effective as outsourcing can be more affordable in the long run rather than hiring and interviewing and all processes that come with it. Also, it's like an in-house team especially when leveraging lower costs. In terms of scalability, the strategic partner can quickly scale as they have the availability most times of the resources needed depending on project needs. They also have good access to expertise as they learn from so many projects and gain a broad range of knowledge and experiences across technologies and industries. 

On the other hand, because you may have a supplier supplying all their QA’s, there could be communication barriers, such as time zone differences, and language and cultural barriers which may end up affecting a lot of the communication. Furthermore, there is less control over the testing process as higher managers may be busy aligning outsourcing partners with the quality standards, potentially delaying the testing tasks. Relying heavily on an external partner can create risks if the partnership ends abruptly.

Best For

• Companies that need to scale their QA efforts quickly without a significant upfront investment.
• Organizations with well-defined testing requirements that can be easily communicated to an external team.

Engineers Managing QA

Having existing engineering teams manage testing can be a good option, as we can have developers test logic flows. However, having a QA do this task may be better since they think outside the box, are curious, and try all possible edge cases that developers might not cater to. QAs cannot be replaced but can collaborate with engineers to have a good quality product. This is a good interim plan if other options are unavailable due to cost and time. This process allows good use of cost as it will use existing engineering resources and can save costs associated with hiring a dedicated QA team. Not just that, it will also mean that engineers have a deep understanding of the product, leading to more effective testing, and seamless integration testing can be developed fostering a culture of quality. 

However, there could be some disadvantages to this such as a conflict of interest because having engineers test their own code can lead to biased results and missed defects. Adding QA responsibilities on developers can also lead to burnout and impact their primary development tasks(domino effect). The main issue is that engineers may lack expertise in software testing resulting in less thorough testing like exploratory testing.

Best For

• Early-stage startups with limited resources and straightforward testing requirements.
• Organizations looking to foster a culture of quality but planning to invest in dedicated QA later.

Partnering with a Testing Service

This service means doing part of the testing project in-house and collaboratively working with a Testing service (this could be an outsourced company too or internally)

Similar to outsourcing testing tasks, partnering with a testing service could be a good solution for you. How you may ask? Having such services available means having access to the latest testing tools and technologies. Furthermore, partnering means bringing specialized knowledge and experience in various testing methodologies. So, essentially the best of both situations is in-house and Testing services. This allows higher management to focus on the code business too, as outsourcing testing to a service partner allows your team to focus on core business activities.

What could even be the cons of this? As great as this partnership sounds, some cons come with it like costs; as often more cost-effective than an in-house team, testing services can still be a significant expense. There can be integration challenges, ensuring the testing service integrates well with your development processes can be challenging. This leads to quality standards potentially being affected, as external partners require careful management and oversight.

Best For

• Companies needing comprehensive testing solutions and access to advanced tools without significant upfront investments.
• Organizations with fluctuating testing needs that require flexible and scalable solutions.

Making the Right Choice

When making decisions on a QA team there are some key considerations to be made as choosing the right QA approach will be a critical decision that can impact your products quality and team productivity. 

• Budget: Assess your financial resources and determine how much you can invest in QA.
• Product Complexity: Consider the complexity of your product and the level of testing required.
• Team Size and Expertise: Evaluate your existing team's capacity and expertise in QA.
• Timeline: Determine how quickly you need to implement a QA solution and achieve results.

Final Thoughts

Whether you decide to build an in-house team, outsource, leverage your engineers, or partner with a testing service, it's essential to weigh the pros and cons carefully. By considering your specific needs, resources, and long-term goals, you can select the best strategy to ensure your product meets the highest quality standards.