How to add outside testers to your team without changing how it works
Short answer
QA staff augmentation means outside testers join your existing team, work in your sprints and tools, and report to your leads, while you keep your own QA people and your way of working. It works when the outside team adapts to your process instead of replacing it, starts by reviewing requirements before code is written, and makes sure the bugs that matter get fixed, not just reported.
A common call we get goes like this. A product company has developers, a product owner, a business analyst and one or two testers, and has always been a little light on QA. They are not looking to hand testing over to someone else. They want a team they can trust to add capacity for the projects coming up, and to bring skills they do not have in house.
This guide covers how that works in practice, and what to ask before you pick a partner.
Augmentation, outsourcing or hiring
The three options solve different problems, and teams often ask for one when they need another.
| Augmentation | Outsourcing | Hiring | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who runs testing | Your leads, with outside testers in the team | The vendor, end to end | Your leads |
| Your process | Stays, with gaps filled | Replaced by the vendor's | Stays |
| Scaling up and down | Per project, in weeks | Per contract | Slow, and hard to reverse |
| Best when | You have QA but not enough, or not every skill | You have no QA function yet | The need is permanent and stable |
If you have no testers at all, our page on QA outsourcing is the better starting point.
Signs that augmentation is the right move
- Good testers are hard to hire. Plenty of people apply for QA roles. Far fewer can find the bugs that matter and explain them so they get fixed.
- Projects come in waves. A release, a new product or a migration needs more testing for a few months, then less.
- You are missing a skill. Security, performance, accessibility or mobile testing on real devices, where a full-time hire makes no sense.
- Developers are testing their own work. As Tudor Brad, our co-founder, puts it: "the chef should not certify his own dish." Developers check that their code does what they meant, which is not the same as checking what users will do with it.
How outside testers fit into your sprints
The work follows your iterations. In each one, a good augmentation team does six things.
- Review the requirements before anything is built. This is the cheapest place to find a bug. For a file upload feature, that means asking which file types are allowed, what happens with a file that has no extension or a corrupted one, whether password-protected files are accepted, which user roles can upload, whether an uploaded file can be opened without logging in, and what the size limit is. Our file upload testing cheat sheet has the full list.
- Write test cases while the developers write the code. Testing starts the moment a build is ready, not a week later.
- Test the feature on its own, then together with the rest of the product. Many bugs only appear where two parts meet.
- Make sure the important bugs get fixed. Finding bugs is half the job. The other half is talking to the developers and the product owner so everyone understands the risk of each one, and agreeing what can ship and what cannot.
- Retest the fixes, and check that nothing else broke along the way.
- Accept the story, then automate the main path, so it does not have to be retested by hand in every future sprint.
How to bring good practice in without disrupting the team
The most common worry is reasonable: you have a way of working that suits you, and you do not want an outside team rewriting it. A good partner starts by learning how you work, then compares it with a checklist of practices, and only proposes changes where there is a gap. Anything you do not need is dropped.
"We're not coming in to change the way you guys are working, because it's too disruptive," is how Tudor describes it to teams. "But there's so many items that we can adjust."
In practice the adjustments are usually small: a common format for bug reports (what, where and when in the title, steps to reproduce, actual and expected result, and a video), requirements reviewed before a sprint starts, and a clear rule for which bugs block a release.
Questions to ask a QA augmentation partner
- Who leads your testers day to day, and who do they report to on our side?
- Where exactly are the engineers based, and which hours do they overlap with ours?
- Can you show us a real bug report format and a test report?
- Can you cover the skills we lack, such as mobile devices, security or performance?
- How fast can you add people for a project, and how much notice do you need to scale down?
- Who owns the test cases, automation and reports you produce? It should be you, from day one.
Our checklist of what a new QA team needs from you in week one covers the access and accounts to prepare once you choose.
Frequently asked questions
Light on QA for the projects ahead?
Tell us what is coming up. We add testers to your team, work in your process, and scale back when the peak is over.
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BetterQA provides independent QA services across manual testing, automation, security audits, and performance testing. ISO 27001, 9001, 14001 and 13485 certified.
