DevOps.com

  • Latest
    • Articles
    • Features
    • Most Read
    • News
    • News Releases
  • Topics
    • AI
    • Continuous Delivery
    • Continuous Testing
    • Cloud
    • Culture
    • DataOps
    • DevSecOps
    • Enterprise DevOps
    • Leadership Suite
    • DevOps Practice
    • ROELBOB
    • DevOps Toolbox
    • IT as Code
  • Videos/Podcasts
    • Techstrong.tv Podcast
    • Techstrong.tv Video Podcast
    • Techstrong.tv - Twitch
    • DevOps Unbound
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming
    • On-Demand Webinars
  • Library
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • On-Demand Events
  • Sponsored Content
  • Related Sites
    • Techstrong Group
    • Container Journal
    • Security Boulevard
    • Techstrong Research
    • DevOps Chat
    • DevOps Dozen
    • DevOps TV
    • Techstrong TV
    • Techstrong.tv Podcast
    • Techstrong.tv Video Podcast
    • Techstrong.tv - Twitch
  • Media Kit
  • About
  • Sponsor
  • AI
  • Cloud
  • Continuous Delivery
  • Continuous Testing
  • DataOps
  • DevSecOps
  • DevOps Onramp
  • Platform Engineering
  • Low-Code/No-Code
  • IT as Code
  • More
    • Application Performance Management/Monitoring
    • Culture
    • Enterprise DevOps
    • ROELBOB
Hot Topics
  • Where Does Observability Stand Today, and Where is it Going Next?
  • Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities
  • A Freelancer's Workflow
  • Azure Migration Strategy: Tools, Costs and Best Practices
  • Blameless Integrates Incident Management Platform With Opsgenie

Home » Blogs » Enterprise DevOps » Agile QA at Scale: Software Testing Strategies for Enterprise Teams

Agile QA at Scale: Software Testing Strategies for Enterprise Teams

Avatar photoBy: Anand Ramakrishnan on August 28, 2019 3 Comments

Change is hard; it’s a universal truth not many people would disagree with. When you’re forcing (or strongly encouraging) change in a group of people, it’s especially hard. Even if that group is small, there’s bound to be miscommunication, disagreement and other friction points that make the change hard to implement.

Related Posts
  • Agile QA at Scale: Software Testing Strategies for Enterprise Teams
  • What is expected of software developers vs QA testers during development?
  • Continuous Testing: What exactly is it?
    Related Categories
  • Blogs
  • DevOps Culture
  • DevOps Practice
  • Enterprise DevOps
    Related Topics
  • agile QA
  • automation testing
  • QA
  • software testing
  • testing strategies
Show more
Show less

Now, multiply those difficulties by a factor of five. Now 10, 20 and so forth. This is the challenge of growing and expanding an organization. While you need to bring more people on board to fuel your growth, build a better product or improve the leadership, you also need to manage the complexity introduced by a skyrocketing headcount.

TechStrong Con 2023Sponsorships Available

More and more teams are accepting the challenge of switching to agile QA because it saves time, improves team collaboration and results in a superior product in a consistent, repeatable way. But most of the how-to articles and strategy guides out there only focus on small teams. What about the enterprise team ready to make the switch?

Let’s look at a few software testing strategies for enterprise teams who have—or are in the process of—adopting agile QA in their organization.

Outline a QA Strategy that Is Scalable

Scalability starts early. You don’t want to set off running with a strategy that doesn’t fit your current team or is unable to expand with your team as it grows in the future. It’s key to adopt an approach that is flexible in all areas, from the technical aspects (tools and infrastructure) to team hierarchy and how resources are managed. If you don’t have a QA expert in-house, you may consider hiring a QA vendor to mentor you on testing approach, scalability best practices and team structuring.

Bring on the Right Skill Sets

Know what your business priorities are, what types of skills and technical expertise those priorities require and hire the right team for the job. With a solid team in place, you can scale up or down as needed. It helps to bring in both generalists (people who can handle a bunch of different domains) and specialists (people with a niche focus or specialty area). As you grow, your rock-star engineers will, too—they’ll move into management roles, continuing to motivate, lead and challenge their direct reports.

Choose Metrics that Make Sense

If you don’t measure progress and team output, you won’t know when it’s time to scale—or in which area that scaling is required. Be sure to invest time and care into the process of defining your success metrics, as they’ll have big implications for how your team is structured and how it grows in the future. Also be aware many success metrics focus too narrowly on code coverage and the number of tests executed. These are important numbers, but not as important as the overall quality of the product, which should be your “North Star” metric.

Automate What You Can

One of the easiest ways to scale without immediately adding headcount is to invest in automation testing. By automating regression testing and other intensively manual tests, you can free up engineers to work on higher priority projects, save more of the team’s time and cut resourcing costs. Plus, automation can help improve the quality of the product by reducing the number of human errors.

No experience with automation testing? There are QA vendors out there offering expert automation teams who can learn your product, culture and processes in no time flat.

Monitor and Maintain

If you can spare it, devoting headcount specifically to monitoring the errors and alerts that arise during testing can help expedite the rest of the team’s work. When engineers don’t have to go back and work on every little fix or patch, they can focus on driving through their higher priority workload. Nitpicking the small stuff just isn’t feasible at the enterprise level, especially if you’re employing gifted and talented engineers.

Here’s What You Need to Know

  1. How to Scale Your QA Team Effectively
    • Involve QA as early as possible
    • Design effective test strategies
    • Focus less on narrow metrics; more on product quality
    • Switch to smaller, more frequent releases
    • Test based on real-world user experiences
  2. Attributes of Agile QA at Scale
    • Automation is a part of the process
    • Engineers take ownership of their modules
    • Quality is top priority (“North Star”) of the whole team
  3. Strategies for Scaling QA
    • Understanding business priorities
    • Building a skilled team that reflects those priorities
    • Creating a roadmap for troubleshooting quality issues
    • Implementing technical and managerial strategies that scale

Wrapping Up

Everyone knows change is hard, especially when it requires people to work differently, work harder or work together in ways that are new, inefficient (only at first) and potentially uncomfortable.

Successfully scaling agile QA is one of the best ways to ensure you’re consistently delivering a quality product to market. No wonder why teams small, large and enterprise-level are taking on the challenge—and with these strategies, you can too.

— Anand Ramakrishnan

Filed Under: Blogs, DevOps Culture, DevOps Practice, Enterprise DevOps Tagged With: agile QA, automation testing, QA, software testing, testing strategies

« Aspects of Machine Learning on the Edge
Qualitest Appoints Yoav Ziv as Chief Transformation Officer »

Techstrong TV – Live

Click full-screen to enable volume control
Watch latest episodes and shows

Upcoming Webinars

Automating Day 2 Operations: Best Practices and Outcomes
Tuesday, February 7, 2023 - 3:00 pm EST
Shipping Applications Faster With Kubernetes: Myth or Reality?
Wednesday, February 8, 2023 - 1:00 pm EST
Why Current Approaches To "Shift-Left" Are A DevOps Antipattern
Thursday, February 9, 2023 - 1:00 pm EST

Sponsored Content

The Google Cloud DevOps Awards: Apply Now!

January 10, 2023 | Brenna Washington

Codenotary Extends Dynamic SBOM Reach to Serverless Computing Platforms

December 9, 2022 | Mike Vizard

Why a Low-Code Platform Should Have Pro-Code Capabilities

March 24, 2021 | Andrew Manby

AWS Well-Architected Framework Elevates Agility

December 17, 2020 | JT Giri

Practical Approaches to Long-Term Cloud-Native Security

December 5, 2019 | Chris Tozzi

Latest from DevOps.com

Where Does Observability Stand Today, and Where is it Going Next?
February 6, 2023 | Tomer Levy
Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities
February 6, 2023 | Mike Vizard
Azure Migration Strategy: Tools, Costs and Best Practices
February 3, 2023 | Gilad David Maayan
Blameless Integrates Incident Management Platform With Opsgenie
February 3, 2023 | Mike Vizard
OpenAI Hires 1,000 Low Wage Coders to Retrain Copilot | Netflix Blocks Password Sharing
February 2, 2023 | Richi Jennings

TSTV Podcast

On-Demand Webinars

DevOps.com Webinar ReplaysDevOps.com Webinar Replays

GET THE TOP STORIES OF THE WEEK

Most Read on DevOps.com

OpenAI Hires 1,000 Low Wage Coders to Retrain Copilot | Netflix Blocks Password Sharing
February 2, 2023 | Richi Jennings
Automation Challenges Holding DevOps Back
February 1, 2023 | Mike Vizard
Jellyfish Adds Tool to Visualize Software Development Workflows
January 31, 2023 | Mike Vizard
Cisco AppDynamics Survey Surfaces DevSecOps Challenges
January 31, 2023 | Mike Vizard
Red Hat Brings Ansible Automation to Google Cloud
February 2, 2023 | Mike Vizard
  • Home
  • About DevOps.com
  • Meet our Authors
  • Write for DevOps.com
  • Media Kit
  • Sponsor Info
  • Copyright
  • TOS
  • Privacy Policy

Powered by Techstrong Group, Inc.

© 2023 ·Techstrong Group, Inc.All rights reserved.