I’ve recently joined a new team as the only QA tester, and I’m looking to establish an effective QA structure and process from the ground up. Additionally, I am responsible for automating the products.
What’s your advice or insight on how to go about this?
I recommend you take your time. Attack the problems you know how to address and for the rest you’ll need to rely on the larger engineering team.
The first time I was a solo tester I tried adding lots of processes because that’s what I thought I should do. Turns out the company just didn’t need it and we didn’t use a lot of stuff. Work with your engineering team to find the problems and then start to chip away little by little at addressing them.
It depends. (Because doesn’t it always?)
Does “new team” mean “new product”, a greenfield development? Do the developers write tests? What does “quality” mean in your context? For me (and I presume for many), quality is adherence to stakeholder requirements. Obviously this includes the unstated requirement of high build quality.
So you have two jobs: making sure that the software aligns with what the stakeholders want (good luck with getting clarity on that in the short term) and that it ‘works’. At a fundamental level, tests are aligned with requirements more than the implementation.
But what does “an effective QA structure and process” actually look like? Does it mean that you are able to provide a high level of transparency about the quality inherent in the software? Or does it mean that your presence in the team ensures that defects are never written in the first place?
if i was in this position, i would like to desgin a QA process and involve all aspects of the whole R&D team in it. for instance, different levels of testing will be designed. The unit test will be written by developers and it must be covered with certain percentage before SIT testing. Also i will ask developers to write API documents/swagger so i could prepare automated API test. Some of the AI could be involved in it to make it effectively. Then i also need some manual test to make sure the main business workflow works well. Finally, PO will be ask to take acceptance test to double check the product meet the original requirements. in summary, quality is everyone’s responsiblity, not only the QA tester. you should involve everyone into the process to work with you.
Agreed so many questions as context is important - but great topic! Is it a Waterfall or Agile environment? Does the Senior Stakeholder/Head of Engineering etc. want a result oriented team or individuals, what are the priorities for the business, what are the business values, how mature is the team, what is the structure. Have you joined the team from another internal team or are you also new to the business? You have a huge huge task so would be good to also understand what support you have? Imagine the task at hand was a product you needed to test. You could Mindmap out all that you have to cover and the impacts. Then Risk storm it. This could help you identify what to start with and give you a way of explaining the reasoning to leadership. What’s the priorities for these goals, what issues do you need to mitigate, what support do you need etc.
Congrats on your new role and challenge! My advice would be to establish what the word “quality” means to all of your stakeholders (users, BAs, company leadership and of course dev team). What are the characteristics they must have? This will give you a quality matrix, gives you something on which to base a risk log - then you know where to mount most efforts as you cannot expect to test everything.
Most important is to try to establish a quality ethos within the organisation, and be careful, don’t let “test automation” mean “developers no longer write tests” as you may end up being used as a back stop. Quality belongs to everyone.
Can agree to all this and add - get closer to whatever customer you have than the programmers get. Learn what your customers really want. Talk to people. The process starts by writing down what actually happens.
I was in this position twice already, the process depends on the size and complexity of the products.
As @ckenst said, take your time, evaluate the product you have in your hands first, then attack the immediate problems that are possible to address.
Try to communicate with the rest of the team the best you can, you cannot maintain the quality of the system alone, everyone needs to help and everyone needs to know the situation of the team to work together.
Explain that you will need time to automate, sometimes the demands are too high and there is not enough time to automate if there are a bunch of new features being developed every week for you to test and do the regression test manually. The automation project will be your right hand, specially for regression testing 
And don’t be too rigid with the team, they are your allies, the key part here is communication, everyone will work together to get the product online.
I don’t have experience of this situation, what comes to mind is to ask the team what aspects of testing they think would be impactful. Is there a certain feature that regresses often that should be the first focus for automation? Are there problems that arise with the design that could be headed off with more testing at the refinement stage? You’ll benefit from their domain knowledge before you gain it yourself, and hopefully get them on your side too!