How to build your dream QA team?
Good question, Bug Hunters, right?
Before starting the hiring process it is important to understand what type of team members do project require. The following questions could be answered first:
- What are the skills needed for the project?
- How can we share responsibilities when company is rapidly growing?
- How to motivate these who were with a company for a while?
- Do we need to hire senior/lead roles or we can promote inside the company?
Let’s go through answers one by one.
What are the skills needed for hiring new QA members?
Skillset
It is hard to define the unified skillset that can fit anyone. Obviously it is vary from project to project — sometimes only manual QAs are enough however sometimes Automation team members should be in place as well. At this stage even more questions pops up:
- If we hire only SDETs — who will do manual work? I am pretty sure SDETs will get bored writing test cases and might leave the company for more “techy” opportunities.
- If we hire only manual QA for Agile project— how can we speed up delivery if there is no automation?
- If there is any specific needs on the project such as knowing particular language for localisation testing(arabic for instance), knowledges in particular domain etc. — these are also need to be considered.
The good start is to list all skills required for the project(here is the example what we required in our project):
- Native in particular language(Arabic language)
- Automation level (Mid/Senior or Automation Architect)
- Specific types of testing (example performance testing expirience)
- Particular domain experience (example fin-tech or e-commerce)
- Good manual QA with tech knowledges (API testing, DBs, Logs etc)
There are might be much more and once list is complete it will be more clear who exactly we are looking for. Sometimes one candidate might have several skills from the list — in this case we need to balance the skillset in the team.
Good mixture of QA Engineers who know basic automation or manual who are willing to learn it and QA Automation (SDETs) who are more advanced in it can be a great fit in order to archive delivery together with a good automation coverage at the same time.
Share % of involvement in automation
Let’s say we have 2 QA in scrum team. In order to engage both — SDET with interesting tasks and Manual QA with a possibility to learn automation — % of involvement has been introduced
Example:
QA Manuals — these can focus on manual part of QA process and if they are willing they can learn automation by spending 20% of their time on it. It can be simple test fixes that are leading to writing scripts in the future as well
QA engineers (Jun/mid automation)— knows how to write tests based on examples, fix failures. These QAs would focus 80% on manual testing and Quality of the scrum team delivery and 20% automation (fixing tests when required, add more coverage)
Software Developer in Test — has in depth knowledges on coding, technologies, best practices, architectural level of automation framework, integrations etc. SDETs would focus 80% on Automation testing (architectural level) and 20% on manual (yes, we still need to do manual to know what to automate from the user perspective). In case of urgent delivery support SDETs will also help here.
This % division helps to entertain both — Seniors and Jun/Middle QAs.
How can we share responsibilities when company is rapidly growing?
QA manager can be on top of everything until it is physically impossible. If project is growing, teams are growing — it is important to give part of responsibilities which are project related to other Senior team members.
These Senior QAs who works on huge modules day to day can own it from QA perspective and be an “anchor” for it. They know best each and every details in this module so any questions can be addressed to them. And they can also mentor Jun/Mid QAs who are coming to teams as well.
On this diagram there is a structure for the team with less than 10 QAs to give a better visibility:
Possible responsibilities could be:
QA Manager :
- own QA on the project overall
- bring best practices in QA, processes
- plan releases
- set the path for automation priorities (work closely with Automation Lead)
- metrics
- people management (1–1, performance reviews etc)
Automation guild Lead :
- prepare tech solutions
- work on gaps in framework
- best practices in automation
- planning tasks based for QA team from automation point of view
Module Anchor :
- guide junior/middle QA
- manage QA tasks in order to archive team goals
- contribute in performance review of junior members
- manage squad level QA activities
Junior/Middle QAs :
- making sure items get delivered in sprints
- participate in automation scripting/fixes when needed
- etc
Do we need to hire senior/lead people or we can promote inside the company?
I personally believe it is more motivating to promote people internally rather than hire from outside. The only exception could be — people internally do not have needed skills.
If someone in your team is willing to grow and try to lead some part of the work — it is important to give this opportunity and guide as much as possible instead of just hiring someone with these skills.
Note: This might work for the team size of 10 or less. If team grows more — Head of QA can be introduced and more QA Managers will come in place with similar structure being multiplied.
To finalise
There are plenty of ways how to build QA team. This way worked for our company so i thought to share it. Saying that i would like to know how do you structure your teams and what are the benefits or challenges with the structure you use? Looking forward for comments to discuss it further
