How to Hire an Excellent QA Consultant?
It’s the process that delivers quality…
Right from the development of the product to deployment, it is necessary to have the most agile QA processes established for any QA team. Quality assurance is not an elementary check that needs to be incorporated right before deployment, more like a quality check, QA is a process that needs to be imbibed from the beginning to the end. It’s vital if you wish to create a smooth sustainable, high-quality product in hand. Choosing the right QA testing services could be a task. With thousands of QA assurance and software testing teams available across the world, how do you choose the one made for you?
Instead of spending hours interviewing candidates after candidates, you can refer to this 101 checklist on pointers to keep in mind before hiring the best QA consultant for your business projects.
Before moving further, it’ll be better to know more about how the career path of a typical QA analyst looks like.
Career Path for a QA Analyst
Like any other profession, being an excellent QA consultant means you have good ground knowledge of the basic concepts of coding and software engineering. As you graduate from one level to another, there is a shift from monitoring and reporting deviations to solving the root cause of problems for dedicated projects. Individually, any tester can identify their areas of interest and various opportunities to expand their horizons of expertise in different domains. For any typical QA analyst working in this profession, there are a series of options available:
- Continue with the current profile and become an expert
- Identify your area of interest and specialise in that domain
- Level up with hands-on for tools and frameworks
- Try a hand over freelancing or consultancies
Like every other IT-based profession, the sky is the limit for a QA analyst. There are thousands of opportunities.
Keeping in mind the career growth of a QA consultant, it becomes easy to choose the one for your own business. All you need to do is align your business domain with your consultants’ career preferences and sooner than later you’ll see a QA partner grow with your project and deliver the best results.
Now a single QA consultant can at times be enough to work on a project but if you are a large scale organisation or an enterprise, then depending on the size of your project, you may require more than one or a team of QA consultants to deliver your requirements. Let’s have a look at the right process to hire the best QA team for your project.
Finding The Right QA Team
So how do you hire the best QA consultant?
The entire process is primarily divided into 3 major categories. Pre-Interview, The Interview and Post-Interview. Let’s have a closer look.
The Pre-Interview Hussle
Plan
Choosing the right software testing company for your future projects is one of the most crucial tasks of an enterprise, as this can directly influence the output you produce in the market. But, before you begin your hunt for the most suitable testing partner, it’s important to have clarity over your future project requirements. Planning fields like goals and objectives of your company, software, hardware, tools and frameworks to be used, total budget, manpower, etc are essential.
Make a clear business plan for what you need your QA consultant to do for you. How much time do you expect the project to take and how much budget do wish to allow for the entire project. The success of your ideal quality analysts’ hunt is directly proportional to the clarity you have for the above pointers in hand.
Size Matters
You need to ensure you hire a team proportional to the size of your organisation. This would help your QA partner identify with your goals as it directly impacts the way you will be treated as a customer.
A firm bigger than yours may not take your projects seriously and a firm too small may not have enough resources to fulfil your project requirements. Both ways your project results may get impacted by the choice of your testing company.
Hence your first step would be to look for a company with matching manpower and an optimum annual funding budget, preferably similar to yours.
Read Reviews
Almost every other smart customer check for reviews before buying a product or service from the market. Be it a small product from amazon or a larger service like quality assurance and testing. You can look for companies on popular reviews platforms like Clutch, Good firms etc. and find out more about the feedbacks their clients have left for them. They also provide you vendor rating lists by country, type of service, customer feedbacks, hourly rates etc. that would help you filter down your research, something like this-
Next, you can look for the number of employees, foundation dates, industry focus, client focus, etc. The best part about checking for reviews on such reputed platforms is the fact that they verify every review before posting it and hence ensure they provide trustworthy information only. Some of these platforms also provide feedback on the tools or frameworks used by the teams along with creating a community of supporters within the platform to discuss points for users.
Consider Your Geography
Though your tech projects can be successfully delivered regardless of where the company is headquartered, having a company near your office location can have its own set of benefits.
In cases where the geographical location of your company is in areas that lack skilled developers, your outsourcing budget can take a toll. That’s where ‘nearshoring’ can come as a rescue option for your company.
The moment you decide to outsource a software testing company you have three options available for you to explore
- Onshoring — For example, your company is in South Korea and you hire a company in South Korea
- Offshoring — For example, your company is in the USA and you hire a company in North Korea
- Nearshoring — For example, your company is in Germany and you hire a company in Poland
Check Out Websites and Portfolios
Look at the website to check for details. The website is the digital face of any organisation, hence a quick look at it would not only tell you about the services they offer but also about how focussed they are when it comes to small detailing. If you wish to get an idea about how peculiar the company is for the minutest details on their user interface then a good look at the website of the company would give you a fair idea.
The next step is to check for the company portfolio
- Check for the industry focus: if the company has never delivered a telecommunications project in past, it’ll be very difficult for their team to get accustomed to your project requirements. Here you are specifically looking for a company who has experience handling your kind of products in past. The more the merrier.
- Size of the project: say you come up with five companies that have delivered similar projects in past. Your next task is to filter down for those who’ve handled similar size of the organisations. If a QA team has worked only on small short-term projects, it may not be ready to step up on a large project like yours and test it comprehensively.
Tech-Check
The technology stack is what you need to check next while searching for a potential company that can be your ideal fit. Here again, you need to refer to the website of your shortlisted partner. Websites, where too many technical services are mentioned, should ring a bell for you, as it’s practically impossible for a company to have these many experts unless it’s a giant boss.
An advanced study of your company’s project requirements can come in handy for this step. If you’re well aware as a customer as to what technologies you may require in your projects, you may directly look for a company with expertise in that specific skill and further go on doing an in-depth study of their available analysts. Check for the tools they use, the frameworks they have developed. As an additional step, you can also look for their code repositories on platforms like GitHub and get a fair idea of their technical abilities.
Ask For Blind CV’s
Post shortlisting with reviews and locations, you can go further to ask for working testimonials of experienced testers from the software testing company you choose, along with a brief of the projects they have delivered in past for a specific field of technology that you require.
That way you have clarity over who will be handling your project. This will also help your company have direct communication with your QA consultants in the future.
Once you have filtered down your companies your next big step is to interview them one by one.
The Interview
Let’s have a look at the key pointers you need to keep in mind while interviewing your testing companies. Ask the below-mentioned questions and keep a note of the answers they provide.
Q1: What testing standards does your team follow?
There are a couple of quality assurance processes that have dedicated quality standards for effective testing results. From the most common quality assurance testing standards, we have those set by the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
Q2: What certifications is your team equipped with?
The most important certification your team can have is International Software Testing Qualification Вoard (ISTQB) exam. Any QA engineers can pass this exam and achieve a foundation, advanced, or expert-level qualification. Make sure you ask if the engineers have passed this exam or not before hiring.
Q3: What best practices your team employ?
Here you need to ensure that the QA consultant uses the same testing methodology that complies with your software development process. A difference in traditional development method versus an agile testing practice (or vice versa) may create gaps that may be difficult to cope with once the project has started.
Q4: What testing approach your team uses?
Talk about your project with the vendor and ask them what methodology would they be used to give you the best possible solution. What kind of tools will they deploy or what frameworks would be used?
Post Interview
The Non-disclosure Agreement (NDA)
No matter how small or large your enterprise is, you need to have an NDA signed by the team. After all, you do not want your business idea to be copied by someone else right?
Sighing an NDA protects your business from intellectual property threat and data breach and clearly defines the consequences in case of any breach in agreement that could include a hefty fine or imprisonment.
Discuss The Terms
The best way to approach this step is by having a questionnaire ready and making sure that everyone in the team is on the same page. Conduct a meeting explain your requirements to your consultants along with the terms and let them come with a focussed approach to it.
Finishing Up
Finding the right QA consultant is a tricky task. It’s more like finding the perfect match for your software company because once you identify your ‘the one’ you two can walk a long road of projects after projects together. Make sure you do thorough research on your partner before finalising. The above-mentioned steps can help you where to start and how to approach this business problem. The key is to know where you stand in terms of available monetary and technological resources before beginning and then look for the company you wish to work with.
