QA Process Implementation: a Quick Guide from QA Madness

The sustainability imperative drives people to choose businesses that prioritize quality over quantity. In parallel, the same applies to the IT industry, where customers have a strong preference for apps that are constantly efficient. In contrast, software flicks that are hyped up but, in the long run, offer less, slip through the screens and are soon forsaken.

The optimal preventative measure to avert the latter is to cooperate with a QA company. Yet, you may be hesitant to partner up with a quality assurance provider as you don’t know exactly what is going on during QA integration. We’ll be glad to present you with useful info on how QA processes are implemented using our procedures as an example.

Step 1 – Introduction

The starting point is a conversation with our CTO, where you establish your needs and project specifics. During our call, we’ll get acquainted with your product in general, learn your expectations about QA, and realize your goals to assess the scope of work. In turn, you’ll receive more details about our company, services, and approaches to collaboration.

Step 2 – Deciding on the Cooperation Type

After analyzing the details, we’ill present you with the information regarding our cooperation – what we can offer and how things would move forward. Before proceeding, we’ll determine the collaboration approach that best suits you:

Estimate

This option should function well for in-development projects, carrying out one round of testing (partial or full coverage), presenting the product to stakeholders, and making sure that the software is ready to go live.

If you decide that this cooperation is suitable for you, we’ll ask you to provide software-related files/links so that we can assess and determine a suitable way forward. Specifically, you could share:

• A link to the project itself, its design, and/or relevant documentation.
• Your preferences regarding devices, browsers, integration, testing types, etc.

Your privacy will be upheld, thus, before exchanging any project-related files, we’ll sign an NDA and respective documents.

Based on your objectives, we create an appraisal where, after evaluating your project, the details are provided on:

• Operating systems, devices, and browsers that will be used for testing.
• An approximate checklist with the functionality to be inspected.
• How much time testing of each point on the list will take.
• Expense explanation for every aspect and the total sum.

Defining the deadlines for your project lets us know how to better arrange starting dates and organize tasks for greater efficiency.

Dedicated expert/team

Deriving from your requests, we’ll provide you with the needed number of QA experts. They will be working exclusively on your project for eight hours, five days per week. The integration process of new QA agents is the following:

1. We present CVs of preselected professionals.
2. You can carry out interviews and settle on those you deem most suitable.
3. Confirming with you, we determine the starting-work dates.
4. The selected candidate gets to know your processes, software product, and obtains all necessary access to relevant documentation. As a rule, onboarding takes a few days at most.
5. Appointed QA expert(s) works per your established flow.

After working with you for a while and becoming well-versed in your business processes, the QA engineer could potentially offer adjustments to enhance your team’s efficacy. No changes are ‘enforced’, whether to accept new perspectives is entirely your decision.

Part-time

If you have a steady workload, but it’s not sufficient for a full-time involvement, the part-time approach should fit well. Determining QA engineers who will work with you is done similarly to the previous variant. The only difference comes when deciding on the work schedule. For example, it can be:

• Working three days per week.
• Working every second week of the month.
• Working each business day for four hours.
• Or other variants that suit your team.

If you haven’t had QA specialists on the team before

If you don’t have a QA division and aren’t sure how to organize it, don’t worry, we’ll appoint an experienced QA Lead to take care of the working processes, specifically:

1. After signing the agreements, they should get access/links to the project, communication channels, documentation/design, bug-trackers (if any), and other tools.
2. They could be onboarded by your team or get acquainted with the project themselves.
3. They will evaluate your current strategy to define the procedures that should involve QA experts’ duties and modify them accordingly.
4. All the necessary QA activities will be performed, bugs detected and reported, and recommendations on quality improvements shared.

So, each cooperation type covers exactly what you need, and the QA process setup is included in the package if such expertise is required.

Step 3 – Organizing the Working Environment

Creating common work areas is vital for efficient partnership. Virtual spaces where the whole team can coexist and operate include:

• Convenient communication platforms where we can converse and provide updates (Slack, Skype, etc.).
• Project management apps where you/your team can track the progress.
• Bug-tracking software in which we present the work done, etc.

Even if not all members are in the same time zone, we can adjust our schedules to have more common hours.

Working With Teams in Different Time Zones: Our Experience

Step 4 – Work in Progress

After the preparation stages are finished, our team will begin their work. By this time, we’ll agree on what activities our QA experts will perform and what testing documentation they will prepare and provide. Among the things you can expect from us are:

• Broad capabilities in manual and automated testing.
• Domain knowledge and focus on end-user perspective.
• Full immersion in team activities (meetings/calls).
• Direct and transparent communication.
• Detailed and guiding testing documentation.
• Temporary replacement for a QA engineer on vacation.
• Improvement suggestions from QA specialists.
• Assistance of a personal customer care manager.

Preserving the expertise obtained from our cooperation will be useful for your project’s future. Test cases, bug reports, and any other documentation will be particularly important for:

• Project’s maintenance.
• QA process adjustments.
• Onboarding new specialists.
• App’s requirement alterations/finalization.
• Requirement specification writing/updates.

Well-kept project documentation will ensure that there are no bottlenecks in further project support.

Step 5 – Team Scaling

In-progress alterations and scaling are normal for any product’s life cycle. As the workload is advancing, you can:

Request a dynamic team

Before important or big releases, we can provide QA engineer(s) from our dynamic team to work with you on a short-term basis (for several days or weeks).

Extend your QA team

We can integrate and onboard new experts within short periods, so the product team could keep the development pace and deliver timely releases.

In addition to outsourcing QA, our company provides IT recruitment services. If you have a request for specific skills, proficiencies, and expertise, our QA recruiters with tech backgrounds will work on it. In this case, however, it will be outstaffing with further management on your side.

IT Recruitment Insights from a QA Outsource Company

Cooperate with our partners

Besides the abovementioned services, our team can help you close a number of other requests. In particular, we have an external team of security specialists who can run web and mobile penetration testing, source code review, and security audit.

QA Madness also has partnerships with companies specializing in:

• Software development.
• Load testing.
• Blockchain.

Thus, you can rest assured that occurring changes will be taken care of and brought to full completion.

Wrapping Up

Trusting another team with your idea may be a bit scary. But no great deed was done with complete certainty. For you, it is simply about choosing the right QA service provider. We hope that now you are more familiar with how implementing QA processes goes down and ready to begin your fruitful partnership.