How We Built a Seamless Process Working as a Remote QA Team

BlogUPDATED ON September 22, 2021

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remote qa team

How our Remote QA Team combined with an In-House Development Team for a Seamless Process

Dedicating our remote team to our customers, we often face different situations and receive non-standard requests. According to the outstaffing model, the client receives an entire team of specialists who work on his project, including the developers themselves, as well as the project manager, marketer, and testing specialists. In our case, the client requested only a part of the dedicated team to temporarily supplement his in-house staff. The task that we had to solve by providing the services of a dedicated team of testers formed the basis of this article.

The Challenge – to Unite a Dedicated QA Team with the Customer’s  In-House Development Team

As part of working with our client, we received a request to provide testing specialists only. The client already had its own full-time team that created and launched the product and wanted to establish cooperation with a remote team of QA specialists to get additional opportunities to improve the software.

What Exactly Was Done?

This was not a standard task, so during the process of QA outsourcing, we had to change our approaches, adapt to the customer’s needs, and find new opportunities for seamless process organization.

Establishing lines and rules of communication

When we provide a dedicated team consisting of all the necessary specialists, the communication between them has long been established and the entire team works as a single mechanism. In this case, we not only had to dedicate the part of the team but also find ways to communicate with the client’s developers and the client himself.

We suggested that it would be convenient to communicate with only one person from the client’s team in order to simplify communication between teams and minimize misunderstanding. As a communication application, we chose Slack. As part of our task, it was convenient to conduct all communication with only one person, and at the same time, he had the opportunity to quickly connect a member of the development team to the discussion of a specific question from our testers.

Test-management organization

In order to competently manage testing tasks, we decided to use Jira, since this system makes it possible to clearly separate the tasks of testers from the tasks of developers, but at the same time keep all tasks in one place to track changes.

As for the technical side of the issue, we used TestRail to plan, create, automate and execute test scenarios. We chose this technology also because it is easy to integrate TestRail and Jira for competent test management.

What is more, since we were physically distant from the development team, we could not participate in live sprint planning, however, our organization of the QA process gave us the opportunity to timely respond to changes from the client and complete our tasks on time.

Automated Testing Organization

Of course, part of the testing tasks had to be automated in order to reduce our time and increase the efficiency of the process. For this purpose, we chose the TestCafe framework, because this technology makes it possible to automate a huge number of different scenarios, generate and customize reports, and easily integrates with TestRail, which we used to manage testing tasks.

[text_on_the_background title=”Every project has its specifics”]That’s why we’ve collected the List of Challenges you may face when hiring a dedicated QA team, as well as the ways to make the process of testing seamless[/text_on_the_background]

Collaboration Between Teams

Our team consisted of several testers, so it was necessary to distribute the load evenly between each member of the QA team. In addition, we needed to clearly separate the tasks of the developers from the tasks of the testers and at the same time not to deprive either of the members of both teams the opportunity to see the changes in the process, plus to give the client the ability to track the result.

With the help of Jira, we distributed the tasks created in TestRail as evenly as possible between the members of our team in order to run as many test cases as possible in as little time as possible, analyze the result and pass it on to the development team for making corrections.


 

Reporting and the Result Evaluation Systems Organization

Using a combination of Jira, TestRail and TestCafe gave us the opportunity to receive detailed reports on each completed action and keep our client informed of all changes. In addition, we needed to find a qualitative indicator of the effectiveness of our work – the number of bugs found does not show the full picture and does not say anything about the effectiveness of each team member. 

However, when all processes are controlled from Jira, the test work is carried out in TestRail, and the results are generated from TestCafe, this makes it possible 

  • to correctly plan each task remotely, 
  • not to mix the tasks of the developers with the tasks of the QA team, 
  • evaluate the productivity of each tester, 
  • identify the points that require improvement and refinement, 
  • as well as provide the client with reports on the errors found, and on the time it took to test and make changes.

The Result

Discussing all the details on the stage of QA consulting and choosing the right model for communication, as well as technologies for managing tasks and test scenarios, gave us the opportunity to test the product as efficiently as if our team was physically located next to the development team of our client. Thanks to this approach, we were able to quickly respond to changes, seamlessly work with developers, and also show the result to the client. 

In the end, our client received the full and seamless integration of our testers with an in-house development team, flexibility in a team’s capacity, an individual approach to planning test tasks, a transparent and simple process of interaction and communication, and the ability to receive detailed reports that show both qualitative and quantitative results.


 

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