How to meet QA responsibilities during a software tester shortage

We're all software testers here

No QA staff doesn't mean no software QA responsibilities, but it does mean getting creative with how those responsibilities are assigned out.

"If you're an early-stage startup still trying to figure out a good market fit, then having existing personnel do their own testing is often the most cost-effective solution," said Joann Chuang Anderson, VP of engineering at Scoop, an enterprise carpooling network. If companies can't hire QA engineers, she recommended that they train internal customer support agents to handle quality checks. These people interact with customers most frequently; thus, they are familiar with the problems users run into.

Once the business stabilizes, QA managers should evaluate the cost of bugs and nonintuitive UX in both monetary and less tangible terms, Anderson said.

Some business questions to ask include the following:

• Are you in a highly competitive market?
• Does your competitive advantage come from being an intuitive product?
• Could competitors take over your market share simply because they have fewer bugs?

Also, evaluate how the team deploys fixes. In a web application, you can issue a fix quite quickly. A mobile app update, however, often requires a day or two to get app store approval, which means those users experience a problem for a longer period of time.

"If either the cost of bugs is high or the time to deploy a fix to users could be long, then you should hire specialized QA," Anderson said. QA engineers act as ambassadors for users; they gain a deep understanding of the product and come up with customized test plans that address user concerns.

All companies should implement an onboarding program that trains new engineers on the overall product, Tal Broner, Executive VP of engineering at Egnyte, an enterprise file sharing service, said, as well as the rest of the organization's software portfolio, to understand the broad digital context. After training, pair a senior engineer with a new engineer for the first few months so the newbies have guidance and support.

Developers and QA think differently

While knowledgeable about code, developers primarily create software. QA engineers focus on all the different ways software can break and how customers could misuse it. So, developers' ability to evaluate software quality is limited in practice.

"Developers are great at writing unit tests," Anderson said, but they might not test the entire end-to-end user flow. If developers must fill the gaps in a software tester shortage, help them out.

Internal policies should include explicit expectations on what tests are required before developers can check in code, which shifts their mindset to software QA responsibilities. Create clear documentation about what entails a good test -- i.e., one that is easily readable, repeatable, stable and free from interdependence. Each test action should have its own assertion to make it easy to debug.

Anderson recommended that an organization create mechanisms, such as regular automation runs with predefined reporting or alerts via dashboards, to ease QA tasks for developers. Also, provide guidelines that explain what to do if a code check-in causes test failures. Clarify, for example, if developers should remove the code from the branch and who or what could block code from being checked in.

When TaaS makes sense

In-house QA personnel typically possess deeper knowledge and a better understanding for testing complicated scenarios and use cases than a hired hand. But, for simple scenarios, especially when testing UX, consider bringing in an external tester -- or dozens of them.

"Their perspective on ease of use is much more objective [than internal employees']," Broner said. "TaaS can be complementary to the existing personnel and close the gap for testing in times when the existing team is not available."

When organizations require manual testing at scale, a TaaS contract provides a roster of testers who are up to QA tasks. TaaS, if the provider has sufficient scale and footprint, can also operate around the clock with continuous deployment.

Shift QA to the left

One strategy on the rise is to incorporate more software QA responsibilities into the development process. Here, you're not asking developers to take over QA tasks during a software tester shortage. Instead, you're making testing part of development forever.

Called shift-left testing, this process requires some additional effort but pays off down the road; teams catch bugs earlier in the software development lifecycle, where the defects can be more quickly and inexpensively remediated than they are with QA as a separate, sequential step.

Initially, shifting left can place an extra burden on QA engineers, who must establish good testing processes for everyone and educate developers -- which, of course, means extra work for developers too. QA engineers must effectively convey the importance of unit tests and automated end-to-end tests to get developers to buy in.

"A developer should know the whole application and understand it and not only the functionality they currently are working on," said Celestyna Górska, senior QA and team leader at Netguru, a custom software development company.

Assign a QA specialist to each development team. If there's not enough QA personnel to make that happen, then the organization should establish precise processes that the team sticks to, such as well-defined quality gates.

Find ways to change the approach within the whole team so that developers have time to write tests and follow processes, in addition to their classic dev responsibilities. QA engineers need to work with managers to ensure developers are accountable for software quality.

After all, Górska said, "Good quality is everyone's business."