Articles

Dedicated QA Team – The Best Practices to Hire It for Your Project Quality Assurance Process

Published on February 8, 2022

Table of contents

What Is a Dedicated QA Team? When Do You Need to Hire a Dedicated QA Team? A Few Words on the Importance of Quality Assurance How to Gather a Dedicated QA Team? How to Manage Your Software Testers Dedicated QA Services at pwrteams

Software projects developed according to the Lean methodology always strive for a reduction in costs via careful idea validations, eliminating time and effort, and delivering as perfectly developed products as possible. Hiring dedicated quality assurance engineers is a way to achieve all these goals. This article will explain the need for a dedicated QA team and the benefits it can promise for your project.

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Liubov Rudnieva
Head of Business Unit

What Is a Dedicated QA Team?

If you have ever used software development outsourcing services, you know that there are three types of contracts that you can choose from. These are fixed-price contracts, time and material contracts, and dedicated development teams.

According to the classical approach to software development outsourcing, the company hires a full-fledged tech team with the necessary expertise to achieve the project goals.

A dedicated quality assurance team, in turn, means the opportunity to hire software testers while running the process of software development either in-house or with the help of another vendor.
It can cover such directions as:

Manual Testing
Automated Testing
Test Automation
Functional Testing
Performance Testing
End-to-End Testing
Mobile App Testing
API Testing
Usability Testing
Localization Testing
Regression Testing
Compatibility Testing
Exploratory Testing
Accessibility Testing
Embedded Testing
Penetration Testing
Portability Testing

When Do You Need to Hire a Dedicated QA Team?

Below are the main cases when you may need software testing services:

You have no QA specialists in-house

Many companies prefer to run their software development process in-house, mainly because of the control that it offers. Companies can easily control and manage their tech team, alongside working on the project.

However, if you have no in-house testers and, what’s more, no desire to hire, train, onboard and retain them, hiring them remotely according to a dedicated team model becomes a better tactic. In this case, you are welcome to use team member extension services, strengthening your in-house development team with remote testers.
You want to cut costs

Logically, hiring a dedicated quality assurance team allows for cutting the operational costs and avoiding additional responsibility when it comes to taxes and payroll. What’s more, this is one of the core ideas behind software development outsourcing as such – you can save your development budget by taking advantage of salary gaps and still accessing the top programming and QA knowledge.
Your dedicated development vendor can’t source a testing team

Sometimes the projects require specific testing knowledge and services, for example, Robotic Process Automation Testing, and their development vendors can’t supply them with specific skills and talents. In this case, you can still mix two dedicated teams from different vendors to close the skill gap.
You need to scale a team as quickly as possible

For the projects being developed in a highly competitive and changeable environment, the need to scale an in-house or remote team can arise suddenly. In such a case, the companies have neither time nor resources to hire QA teams on their own, so proceeding with a ready-made dedicated team model sourced by the QA vendor becomes the smartest option that comes with time and money-saving opportunities.

"We work with them because they provide great QA profile candidates and engineers we can’t find in the local market. The selection of those candidates is made in a similar way we do internally. Our team is involved in that discussion and integrates them as if they’re remote employees of Showpad. They’ve become valuable team members to us. The QA testers have their own dedicated email address and have access to all the systems that all of our engineers have, which is highly appreciated by them."

Chris De Mol

Engineering Operations Director, Showpad

A Few Words on the Importance of Quality Assurance

Quality assurance in software development is essential for two reasons. These are your reputation and your expenses, and both of the reasons are directly interconnected. The disappointed users will quickly abandon the technically-lame app, which will lead to profit loss and reputation damage.

What’s more, the later you discover the critical bug, the more costly it is to fix it. That’s why it is better to always have software testing as one of your development priorities. At the same time, stay tuned into the opportunities to decrease QA costs without sacrificing the quality of the final product.

"We’ve been extremely satisfied with their work, both that of the developers and the QA teammates. They provide test-driven development, proper documentation, consistent creation of unit-testing, and consistent refactoring of code. It is fair to say that they helped us to improve the overall quality of our operations. We learned a lot from them and their experience in working with big corporation."

Stephan Böhmig

CTO and Founder at Wordbee

How to Gather a Dedicated QA Team?

Hiring a dedicated QA specialist opens a way to access skilled talents without the need for inflating your in-house team. Here is how to hire them in three simple steps.

Prepare your requirements

There are a lot of approaches to software testing – for example, manual and automated ones. Before hiring a dedicated QA team, decide on the skills they should have and the practices they should follow. Most companies use a mix of automated testing (for repetitive scenarios) and manual testing (for critical ones).
Decide how many quality assurance engineers you need

Depending on your project size, decide how many software testers you need to effectively test your software, deal with the tasks, and avoid delays. It will significantly shorten the process of gathering the team and hiring it and help to improve the testing environment.
Get in touch with a QA vendor

As the last step, get in touch with a dedicated QA vendor. Ideally, the company should have expertise in your domain and have a testing team already gathered to source it for you. As an option, consider partnering with them for the highest-end testing services on demand.

How to Manage Your Software Testers

Below are some more tips on managing your remote software testers after they have joined your project.

Use the right task management tool

The QA process and software testing should be ongoing – as well as the process of bug reporting and fixing. To streamline both processes, make sure to use the right task management tool that promotes instant communication between the QA manager, QA specialists, and the customer. For example, many companies choose Jira for QA tasks.
Ensure seamless collaboration

As a rule, the dedicated QA team members are already collaborative since they are likely to have a collective work experience before landing your project. Still, when you power your in-house team with remote testers, make sure to develop and suggest such communication practices to integrate both of the teams with each other and make a dedicated team feel a part of your project. In addition to using the efficient task management tool, pick up equally effective solutions for cross-team communication and establish effective communication rules.
Promote early testing

As the last tip, get started with choosing and hiring a dedicated QA team as soon as your project development starts. One of the core principles of the LEAN methodology states that an earlier mistake is always a cheaper mistake, so it is better to get started with software testing immediately after a testable and integrable component is ready. This is especially relevant for security testing, so consider hiring security testers in advance. We can help you streamline your software testing, saving your projects from costly errors with our security testing services.

Dedicated QA Services at pwrteams

In most cases, the need to test your app is pretty urgent since critical errors directly affect the business processes and customer experience. pwrteams is here to support you with a wide range of testing tasks on demand. Our in-house expertise covers multiple domains and testing approaches – getting started with simple manual testing and ending with the full-cycle process of quality assurance for large-scale solutions. We are also ready to supply your project with a remote QA expert within 12 hours of your inquiry.

Get in touch with us right now for software testing services to ensure the perfect quality of your tech project!

Conclusion

There are no more or less important processes in software development. All of them, from idea validation and business analysis to market launch and maintenance, aim to deliver the best user experience possible and solve business tasks in the most effective way. Quality assurance is the way to confirm your app works in the way you and your users expect but despite the seeming simplicity of this approach, it covers a lot of specific tasks and practices you have to follow.

Consider empowering your in-house tech team with remote testers to instantly access the necessary skills and talents, improve team scalability, and meet your deadlines and reasonably cut the development costs.