Scaling your QA can be difficult, even if your team runs like clockwork.
While developing, releasing and adapting strategy simultaneously, the prospect of growing your team can seem daunting, especially if you are keeping up with a rapidly changing product.
Many teams simply can’t hire outright, and it can be extremely time-consuming to do so. Especially with budget constraints.
But, don't worry, help is on the way: scaling your QA team can be done without hiring a single extra person. And we’re here to tell you how.
Keep reading to find out how to approach scaling QA, without the traditional difficulties of hiring new people.
The difficulties that arise hiring in-house
Cost of the hiring process
According to Glassdoor, the average salary of a QA tester is $35,464 a year. And for a QA automation engineer, that salary is even higher at $70,892. Pair that with the price of office space, supplies and the cost to train new employees, and you’re looking at a large cash commitment. Headcount isn’t cheap! Maintaining regular pay stubs for each team member also ensures clear and accurate records of these expenses.
Beyond this, the time spent recruiting these new team members can be extensive. The average employer in the UK spends 27.5 days hiring a new worker. That’s nearly an entire month of time dedicated to a new hire. In a fast-paced software development world, this amount of time can be priceless.
Team size
As well as cost management, a larger team can become increasingly difficult to manage.
For CTOs who need to stay on top of changing trends, new developments in the industry and ensuring they are delivering quality - managing a huge team could leave little time for strategic initiatives. You need enough time to be thinking effectively about the bigger picture.
So, smaller team size can serve you strategic benefits, as well as saving you cost.
Flexibility
Many QA and engineering teams favour Continuous Delivery to keep their product ROI high. Continuous Delivery is all about being able to get new product releases and updates into production quickly, securely, frequently and with minimum software issues. Achieving this successfully requires maximum flexibility.
But, quite rightly, your current QA team have their own lives, families and friends to spend time with, and it's not realistic to have their support 24 hours of the day, and on weekends.
Therefore, having a remote global team assisting you 24/7 can help you achieve this, by providing flexible support when you need it most. And all of this without any internal hires.
Implementing a scaling strategy
So, how do you scale your QA team without hiring anyone?
You need to establish relationships with partners that can support you with solutions that increase your testing capacity without having to put time, budget and energy into internal hires or contractors.
Here’s how partnering with a solution like Global App Testing helps you:
Round the clock support
Crowdtesting companies enable you to test at any time of day. It means you have access to 24/7 support because of the global nature of the crowd. And testers don’t work on a typical 9-5, Monday to Friday schedule, so you can test on weekends too.
Quality
Increased testing capacity and access to more testers leads to one simple thing: more impactful bugs found. If you are finding more of the critical bugs impacting your users, you will be making more critical fixes and, ultimately, shipping better quality products to your users.
Quality is typically assumed to be achieved with a large capacity QA team with endless capabilities, but this isn’t a reality. Crowdsourcing to aid your existing QA team helps you increase quality by accelerating the rate of the right type of testing and delivering test results fast.
Expertise
Partnering with an external solution is not ‘outsourcing’. Instead, you are knowledge sharing, and working with an expert team who can share QA best practices.
Just as hiring new team members means gaining more knowledge, pairing with a solution like GAT provides a wealth of testing advice, tips and feedback too.
Localization
If you are looking to scale your product, you will need to scale your QA team globally also.
Developing a high-quality product that performs as efficiently in France as it does in Japan is of the utmost importance when trying to reach new markets. This requires rigorous localization testing.
In order to truly determine product quality in the wild, you need to use people, devices and locations that can give you the feedback you need. Crowdsourced testing enables your product to be tested by 20-30 testers in any target market without having to hire a QA team abroad. Local testers provide local insights and ensure your product works on multiple devices, providers and locations.
How we can help
Global App Testing is not about outsourcing your QA. Instead, we work with your current QA team, partnering with them to help scale and achieve best in class software quality. We support a shift-left approach towards quality, to help QA become a collective responsibility
Global App Testing is a crowdsourced tech-enabled solution of 30,000 testers in 105 countries. This means your QA team can test 24 hours of the day across the globe. By partnering with GAT, you can scale your product and open it up to global markets, as well as increase your testing capacity, without replacing your QA team.
Conclusion
It is possible to scale your QA team without hiring anyone. And it can be a huge benefit to your company. With a scaled QA team, you can increase testing capacity, have 24-hour support, and deliver a quality product to global markets.
Book a call with one of our experts today for a free QA consultation or to find out how working with Global App Testing can help you.