6 Tips to Build An Effective QA Team
Tags: test, qa, qualityassurance, projects
Published: 2023-03-13 08:37:18

---
title: 6 Tips to Build An Effective QA Team
published: true
date: 2022-12-29 14:00:24 UTC
tags: test,qa,qualityassurance,projects
canonical_url: https://blog.ones.com/6-tips-to-build-an-effective-qa-team
---

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/0*f_eiQ67ykRgG7mAK.png)

The importance of **quality assurance (QA)** in the software development process cannot be overstated, but building and maintaining an effective QA team can be challenging.

When putting together a QA team, there are numerous factors to consider, from the skills and experience of your team members to your approach to testing. It’s also important to remember that you’re not just looking for individual contributors — you’re looking for specialists who can work together as a team.

The quality assurance team uses testing techniques to identify potential issues and facilitate continuous improvement of the product. Creating and maintaining an effective testing team is a critical but arduous task to accomplish.

Let’s discuss 6 tips for building an effective QA team.

### 1. Hire Team Members Who Vary in Their Experiences

Don’t be afraid to hire team members who vary in their experiences. Diversity welcomes new ideas and opens up avenues of improvement for existing setups.

This isn’t to say that you should hire people just starting their careers. You still want team members with a lot of experience and knowledge to share. But you also wish to have team members who differ from each other so that you can benefit from their varied perspectives and skill sets.

For instance, in any software development, a single unattended bug can result in the loss of millions of dollars. This same can be applied to the issues in the execution, [development,](https://blog.ones.com/project-management-challenges?hsLang=en) or creation of any product. Your QA should be diversified enough to detect all the potential problems with the product and can direct them to the concerned teams.

### 2. Define Your Skill Gaps, and Seek to Fill Them

You know your QA team isn’t as effective as it could be. You’ve got some skill gaps that need to be filled. But where do you start?

The first step is to define what those skill gaps are:

- What areas need improvement?
- Do you need more people with experience in manual testing? In automation?
- What about technical expertise?

Once you know your skill gaps, it’s time to seek candidates who can fill them.

Continuing with the same example of software development, if your final product is mismatched with the prototype, then there’s a skill gap at the development stage. Add QA members at this stage to ensure seamless execution of the process. This also helps in [handling unexpected changes in project management](https://blog.ones.com/change-management-in-project-management?hsLang=en).

This might mean looking for people with the right skills and experience or training your current team members in new areas.

[According to Quettra,](https://andrewchen.com/new-data-shows-why-losing-80-of-your-mobile-users-is-normal-and-that-the-best-apps-do-much-better/) the ordinary app ends up losing over 95% of new subscribers after 90 days. On the other hand, the top ten apps on Google Play lose just under 50% of their users. This huge difference depends on the credibility of the QA teams.

### 3. The Clarity of Responsibilities

It will be best if you are clear about the roles and responsibilities of each team member, and you also need to make sure that everyone knows who owns each task. This can be tricky, especially when dealing with a QA team spread out across different time zones.

But to avoid the groupthink trap:

- You need to be organized
- Have strong communication.
- And most importantly, you need to be confident in your approach.

For instance, planning, prototyping, development, testing, deployment, maintenance, and updates teams should be clear about their roles and responsibilities. QA team also needs clarity of responsibilities to ease the identification of potential problems.

### 4. Eager To Learn More

QA is all about learning. Constantly. You need to continually thirst for knowledge because the minute you stop learning, you start falling behind.

And that’s why hiring team members who vary in their experiences is essential.

Self-motivated QA team members will speed up the testing processes. Technically strong people with the motivation and interest to carry out performance testing and product analysis usually bring sound ideas to the table. Their knowledge of books and online sources facilitates them to conduct testing thoroughly, thus reducing the need for manual testing.

### 5. Belief in their Work

It would be best if you were confident in your ability to test software. However, you must also be able to imagine yourself in the shoes of the person who wrote the code. That’s where empathy comes in.

When you can see things from the developer’s perspective, you can start to understand why they made the choices they did. And that understanding will help you test the code more effectively.

You also need to be organized and have strong communication skills. You must be able to communicate your findings to your team members and get their opinions when working in a group.

### 6. Remember, You’re Building a Team of Specialists, Not a Group of Individual Contributors

When you’re building your QA team, you want specialists who can come together to form a cohesive unit.

That means you need team members with different backgrounds so they can bring something innovative to the table while working in a team. They don’t all need to be experts in QA, but you should look for these things:

- They should have a general understanding of how the process works.
- They can be people with different skill sets who can work together to achieve a common goal.

That’s where training and development come in handy. With the right team in place, you can tackle any challenge that comes your way.

When [24% of companies](https://truelist.co/blog/software-testing-statistics/) began automated testing, their ROI increased immediately.

### Conclusion

Your **QA team** is one of the most vital elements of your product development process. But building an effective team can be difficult — especially if you don’t know where to start.

These six tips will help you build the perfect team for your needs. Remember, it’s important to be flexible and to adapt as your needs change constantly.

If you’re looking for an effective QA team that can streamline your manual testing and quality assurance processes and deliver products with end-to-end traceability. Look no further; we at [ONES](https://ones.com/) offer all the tools to manage R&D processes to promote and facilitate collaboration among different members of the software development team.

_Originally published at_ [_https://blog.ones.com_](https://blog.ones.com/6-tips-to-build-an-effective-qa-team) _on December 29, 2022._