Two questions to ask yourself;

Do you need a Contract QA Engineer?  Yes / No / Not sure

What makes a good QA, how do I decide who to hire?

With over 20 years’ experience supplying professional contract test resources and sourcing, onboarding and managing QA teams, these questions are two of the most frequently asked by clients when looking at resourcing challenges for QA projects.

In our experience, the first question is often easier to solve……although some of the benefits may surprise you, especially with financial savings topping the list.

You will probably save money…….what?

According to Businessweek, employers can save up to 30 per cent by hiring a contractor. Even though most employers we work with pay QA contractors more per day than they would pay permanent employees to do the same work, it usually ends up costing employers more to hire employees. Once you have taken into consideration expenses that you don’t have to pay contractors, including National Insurance and the cost of employer-provided benefits like pension contributions, holiday, office space and equipment, etc all together, these payments quickly mount up and can easily increase your payroll significantly.

Skills skills skills!

Your resource budget may also go further when you use QA contractors, namely because they bring specialist expertise to the job, meaning they can hit the ground running and be productive immediately. This virtually eliminates the time and cost of training getting resources up to speed, which is critical when managing tight delivery deadlines.  

Flexibility

Another benefit is that you can ramp up or scale down your QA team as needed, without incurring unnecessary expenses. This can be especially advantageous for projects with fluctuating workloads and provides you with flexibility to respond to change requests, without compromising the quality of the overall user experience.

One of our clients, Technical Director at a leading Digital Agency, recently commented:

“Accelerate provide us with flexible, professional QA resources and expertise that support our Immersive Tech projects. They quickly integrate into our team and can be deployed on-demand, allowing us to fine-tune the customer experience and react to any last-minute changes with confidence.”

So moving onto the second question: What makes a good tester, how do I decide who to hire?

Tenacity? An enquiring mind? Ability to communicate concepts clearly and articulately? Attention to detail?

The truth is all of the above, plus a long list of other skills and attributes which could easily make a blog post on its own (and we will be happy to share with you another time) however if you have a pressing requirement for QA support, we can take the pain away of hiring professional contract resources.

Individual resources or complete teams? We have over 20 years’ experience sourcing, onboarding and managing the UK’s best professional contract testers. We supply Test Analysts, Test Managers and Programme Test Managers, Functional and Non-functional expertise including Test Automation and Performance Testing specialists.

We also provide clients with pop-up, fully-managed QA teams that can be deployed on-demand, onsite or offsite to suit, which can be ramped up as quickly as they can be stood down. This means you can have your own dedicated QA team for a number of days or weeks without any obligation beyond the time you need them.

Our resourcing services naturally complement our other services around automation and process improvement and we provide organisations with an independent, honest and experiential view of their applications.

For more information about how we help organisations find the right resources at the the right time, please feel free to ping us a message mail@accelerateqa.com