I’d love to hear from other QA leaders, what your ideal ratio would be? I’ve read 1:2 and 1:3 as ideal. Meaning for ever 2 or 3 devs there’s 1 QA engineer.
I’d also love to hear, would you include your automation team or regression team in these ratios? Or would you consider your testers only working on feature work part of your ratios? I’m really hoping to start a conversation to understand how other leaders are staffing their teams, and what difficulties you’re running into in terms of staffing or bottlenecks.
Some further considerations: Does this mean people with the job titles developer and QA/tester or the number of hours dedicated to development or QA/testing activity? As people with either job title can perform the other activity too.
I think we’re about 1 tester for 3 developers at the moment, but that’s based on job titles only. However developers do testing, testers do tech support and cloud operations, developers and testers also do business analysis and management.
In my team there are 4 devs and me as a tester, but devs test their own code before tickets come to testing, and afterwards the PO reviews the feature as well. Apart from unit and integration the API e2e tests are all done by the developers. No UI automation at the moment.
The best experience that I’ve had was within a scrum with 4-5 devs and 1 dedicated tester where there’s a culture that everyone and anyone tests. That means you aren’t risking overloading the tester whilst still providing that more immediate feedback.
Within my office the ratio is now about 20:1 as we’ve not rehired testers as they’ve left. The wider organisation probably has a similar ratio but that is largely with dedicated test teams that just test release candidates etc and do system testing.
Personally I don’t like the idea of separate automation or regression teams so I wouldn’t include them in the ratio. To me when thinking about ratios, it is the people working together.