How to Find Your QA Sweet Spot

Managing your QA team never seems to get easier. Whether it’s a release schedule growing faster by the day or budgets shrinking before your eyes, ensuring your QA operation is firing on all cylinders is no easy task.

It seems like every year, the same issues continue to pervade. You are burdened with minimal testing time, insufficient tooling, and processes that result in more headaches than efficiencies. How are you to deal with these mounting issues if things remain the same? The short answer is, you won’t.

In the midst of the frequent chaos your team undoubtedly experiences, it can be difficult to identify potential changes that need to be made, but more importantly, execute on them. This leaves you with the same team to deal with the same issues. To move forward, you have to find your testing sweet spot.

That means implementing new solutions to help augment the abilities of your current team. Per The State of Testing Report 2018, nearly half of testers spend less than 75% of their time doing actual testing. In addition to testing, they are assisting with test automation and scripting, data management, and test environment management. How can you better set your team up for success?

Test Automation

Test automation is something that 85% of companies have already implemented in some capacity, but many have yet to fully harness the value of the solution. When working in concert with manual functional testing, automation has many noticeable benefits from increased release speed to better quality test execution to a more focused internal team.

Per the World Quality Report 2018-2019, there are four areas that hinder teams from achieving their desired level of test automation.

1. The app varies too much from one release to the next
2. A lack of testing environments
3. A lack of skilled and experienced automation resources
4. Not having the proper testing tools

While your in-house resources may be capable of getting things off the ground, getting to that next level requires resources that you likely don’t have internally. Finding a solution that properly augments your internal team and its capabilities can be a challenge, but that solution does exist.

Finding Your Sweet Spot with a Holistic Testing Solution

While it can be tempting to want to solve your QA problems in-house, doing so may only further exacerbate your existing issues. Oftentimes, it takes a fresh perspective and influx of talent to not only improve your overall testing quality, but enhance the productivity of your existing team. Ultimately, the better positioned your internal team is to succeed, the happier they will be in both the long- and short-term.

However, in order to properly identify the right solution to your problems, you need to fully grasp the enormity of what your team is facing and the potential consequences you face if not addressed correctly. Through this perspective, you enable your team to identify where your true pain points lie and what must change in order to make a tangible difference.

A holistic testing solution, like that provided by Applause, provides support in any number of areas you may be lacking – be it scripting automated test cases, manually testing edge cases, or any number of things. But rather than serve as a replacement or distraction to your team, this solution augments your existing team and fills in the gaps you have identified along the way. As a result, you can remove much of the tedious work from your testers’ day-to-day responsibilities, and enable them to focus on more strategic testing and broader company/customer needs.

Get a complete perspective of the current QA landscape and the common challenges teams encounter in our new eBook, Working Smarter, Not Harder Towards QA Quality.