Future Proofing your QA Team

Managing a high-performing QA team is a challenge. This is often made even more challenging by competing priorities on a manager’s time and effort. One of the biggest concerns most managers have is how to future-proof their team. Ensuring your team is ready to tackle the needs of the organization today and in the future requires a combination of intentional focus on retention and forward-thinking.

Retaining the Best Talent

Preventing attrition is a critical component of future-proofing your QA team. Attrition is expensive both in tangible and intangible ways. In a study by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) the cost to replace an employee can be the equivalent of 3 to 4 times the employee’s salary. According to SHRM, only about 30-40% of this cost is tied to hard costs like recruiting; the remaining 60% is a combination of lost productivity, loss of team morale, lost institutional knowledge, and time invested into interviewing and screening resumes. Considering the cost of attrition, the real question is not if you should focus on retention, it’s how to retain your QA team. 

Retaining your QA employees requires leaders to embrace the personality and mindset of testers. A misconception in many engineering teams is assuming the same practices that have been effective in retaining developers will also retain QAs. Conversely, other organizations fail to implement equitable practices and systems that encourage and embrace growth and development in QA teams. Considering many organizations miss the mark in retaining their QA team, what are the practices that work?

Learning and Upskilling

Testers tend to be curious and will jump at the chance to experiment with something new. This curious and experimental mindset is often a defining characteristic in great testers. It’s important this mindset is embraced and encouraged. One of the best ways to do so is by offering opportunities to learn new skills and take on new challenges that use these skills. Learning for QAs can come in many forms and, when possible, should be driven by the employees’ interests. 

Learning for QAs can include formal classroom training, asynchronous virtual learning, shadowing, and more. The best format for learning is dependent on the specific goals of each individual team member. I always ask my team to answer the following questions before they take on a new learning challenge:

• What new skills will be gained?
• How will these new skills be put to use?
• If this is not a classroom training, create a schedule with goals to be achieved.

Conferences and Communities

Conferences are both an opportunity for your QAs to learn and a way for them to engage with the broader testing community. Approaches to testing are often context dependent and vary from organization to organization. Conferences are a great way to expose your QAs to new approaches and techniques along with re-igniting their excitement to test. Communities can have a similar impact as conferences. The expanded network a community creates gives your testers continuous access to new ideas. Managers are often resistant to having their team expand their personal networks through conferences and external communities. This is primarily out of fears about attrition. However, both conferences and communities tend to have the opposite effect. QAs who feel their organization is investing in their career development are more likely to stay and grow with the organization. 

External communities and conferences are tools to give your QA team exposure to the broader industry. It’s equally important your testers have a community of practice within the organization that learns and experiments together. Communities of practice should be driven and guided by its members, and in the case of a testing community of practice, its members can be anyone in the organization who has an interest in building a culture of quality. The best communities of practice have members from a broad cross-section of roles, including developers and product. 

Skill Diversification 

Testers are often encouraged to become T-Shaped. However, for some testers, skills in the idealized T are not a good fit due to lack of interest or aptitude. This is why fostering an environment where skill diversification is embraced and encouraged is beneficial. This may result in some QAs choosing to develop expertise in a specialized area, such as accessibility or performance, and others becoming generalists with a broad skill set of DevOps and automation. Encourage your team to explore new areas that interest them and shadow others to expand their skills. 

Additionally, fostering an environment where QAs are included in conversations about architecture and technical decision-making will help your team learn the language of code. When testers speak the same language as the developers in the organization, they’re able to ask better questions and offer insights that would otherwise be missed. Being a part of these conversations will also give your testers early insight into skills that may need to be learned to test a new feature. 

Managing for the Future

While retention is vital for multiple reasons, retention and upskilling alone will not future-proof your team. Software moves fast, and new technologies are always emerging. As a manager, you have the benefit of a seat at tables your team does not have access to. It’s important you’re engaged in conversations about the future state of your software and evaluate whether your team has the skills needed to test it. Some things to consider are:

• Can the existing test framework handle the future state?
• Is the existing toolset a good fit for the future state?
• Do any team members have the skills needed to handle this testing?
• What percentage of team members will need the skill required?
• How long does the team have to learn the new skill?

Career ladders

One of the most common reasons QAs leave an organization they were otherwise happy and successful in is the lack of meaningful career progression opportunities. Career ladders are a critical part of reducing attrition for all roles. However, many organizations do not have a ladder in place for QA, or the QA ladder lacks parity to the ladder for other roles. Having a defined path with clear expectations of behaviors and skills for each seniority level provides your team the ability to envision their future within the company. When your testers can visualize their future, they are more likely to stay and grow within the organization.

Conclusion

There is no pre-built road map for future-proofing your QA team, but it isn’t impossible; this article offered some ideas on where to start. Future-proofing can be achieved when retention and consideration for the future state of your software are prioritized. Retention is an investment in the long-term success of the team and the organization. Focus on the next phase of the software is an investment in the long term quality of your applications. When systems are leveraged that support and develop the skills of your QA team, both the team and the organization will be set up for long term success. 

Interested in More?

Would you like to learn more about QualityLogic’s approach to software testing and QA? We’d love to share some ideas, just let us know what you’re looking to accomplish.