How to Build the Right QA Team for Your Company

So, you’ve moved past the question "should we hire a QA?" and on to "what kind of QA do we actually need?"*

In my last post, I talked about the QA roles that I think should exist and how I wish companies would evolve their teams to better support product quality. But not every company needs the same QA team setup (some might not even need a QA team at all! 😮). What works for one team might be overkill or completely inadequate for another.

So many companies get this wrong. Many assume all they really need is really high automated test coverage and only hire SDETs. Or worse, they’ll have developers write and maintain all automation. All in the hope that automated tests alone will solve all their quality problems (spoiler: they won’t).

*Note: For more on my thoughts about calling folks “a QA,” see my About page.

Finding Your Ideal QA Team Make Up

So, what kind of QA team does your company actually need? Well… it depends. The best way to figure that out of course is to hire an experienced senior quality professional who has done this before.

But if you’re just looking for a general starting point, you need to start by asking yourself some questions.

What’s Your Company’s Risk Tolerance?

Not every company needs a full-scale QA team. But some companies absolutely do. The level of investment in quality your company needs depends on what’s at stake when things go wrong. For example, an early-stage startup might not need a dedicated quality team just yet. While a more mature product with lots of users would likely want strong quality function in place.

What’s the “Quality Maturity” of Your Team?

How your company approaches quality directly impacts how you should structure your quality team. If quality and testing practices are already baked into your product development process, you will need a very different kind of QA team than a company that treats testing like a last-minute safety net.

What’s Breaking Today?

Every company has quality challenges and they show up in lots of different ways. Identifying and understanding where both your team and your users are struggling can give you valuable insight into where your quality practices need reinforcement.

The Right QA Role Depends on Your Team’s Quality Gaps

Once companies realize they need QA the next mistake they often make is hiring for a solution that fixes the wrong problem. Imagine a team keeps getting blindsided by production issues so they rush to hire an SDET to build and scale test automation.

Now, it’s totally possible that a lack of automation was really the problem! But it’s also possible that the real issue was a lack of exploratory testing. Or unclear requirements. Or missing risk analysis. Or all of the above.

The right QA team isn’t about choosing between automation and manual testing or hiring for a target mix of titles. It’s about solving the specific quality challenges that exist in your product (and on your team!) today.

Start there, and you’ll build a team that actually moves the needle where it matters most.

What’s Next?

In my next post I'll take things one step further and go from “here’s what’s broken” to “here’s what to do about it”. We’ll look at how to turn the quality gaps you discovered into clear, confident decisions that shape not just your QA team, but your entire approach to building quality in.