6 Benefits of having QA as part of the team – ZoomAdmin Week 25 Update

Hey everyone,
We had a great week, with our new QA team members getting up to speed and starting the automation process. I wanted to do this post to go through some of the benefits of having QA as part of your dev team. I believe many startups start this part too late and wait for their customers to find the bugs.
Yes, dev world is embracing agile, it’s the greatest thing ever right? Just release ASAP, fix bugs later. While it may work for some, I am taking a different approach. I want to release a well built, quality product, but QA has many other benefits, so let’s get into them.
QA – stands for Quality Assurance or Quality Analyst or sometimes Quality Assurance Analyst role plays a critical part of development cycle. Every company/team has different approach to QA, but here is how I define the role and view the benefits.
6 QA Role/Benefits:

1. Better Dev Cycles

Works closely with the developer to identify the edge cases and hopefully resolve them with-in the same dev cycle.

2. Developers Love QA

Developers also benefit from having someone else to work with who helps them with not only testing, but also identifying alternative use cases.

3. Better Product

Great QA is able to even shape the product to make it more production ready. They will question the use cases or think about the alternatives. They will view the product more closer to how your customers will view/use it, hence, it definitely helps the product owner as well.

4. Testing Automation

Every company wants to get to automation, but many give up because of the energy/resources needed. But my view is that this is a must have and talent really makes the difference. No, you don’t need to go hire the most experienced person, you need to have better QA Training process, to train those who are ambitious and want to learn because this is the future and can make your product top of the class because you will be able to release faster, and not spend that much time with regression testing. We go as far as providing video training for the automation tool.

5. Solid Product / Team

This combines many of the points I stated above. The combined benefits gives you a solid product and development process that can be scaled and does not break down as your product grows. It allows you to have better visibility of the state of your product and all the issues that you missed. It will minimize the negative press/feedback that your product could get if it’s stable. So long term benefits are also significant.

6. Move Faster

Again, and the biggest benefit which also combines many of the points above is that QA team allows you to move faster, implement more features without breaking existing functionality. As your product grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to achieve this if you don’t start the proper QA process early on and get to automation. You will be chasing production bugs and spending majority of your dev resources on fixing prod issues with every release if your QA process is not great. I believe, in today’s market, you need to be able to move faster to be able to compete. Hence, great QA is a critical part of the equation.
It’s been 2 weeks or so since we hired QA team members, I can already see significant upsides.
Write a comment on Linked Post, let me know if you have QA process/team for your app?