PQA Testing

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We are a full-service digital agency, primarily working with large clients in various industries like finance, pharmaceuticals, consumer packaged goods, and so on. The majority of our work consists of website rebranding and mobile and web application development. We also work in digital media. We are a full-service agency, going from strategy to QA [quality assurance] and development.

What is your position?

I am the vice president of delivery and QA [quality assurance].

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with PQA Testing?

The reason we hired them was primarily to do with the capabilities of our delivery team to handle quality assurance. We did not have a formal process and were doing more ad-hoc, sporadic testing. We started to get larger projects in which that particular approach wasn't going to work. Finding an internal QA person that has the kind of capabilities offered by an agency like PQA is very hard. We did hire someone in-house, but PQA Testing continues to handle our overflow.

SOLUTION

Could you elaborate on the scope of their involvement?

The typical team size is dependent on the project. They offer teams of between one and three testers for any given project on our side. They generate test plans and handle full functionality testing, issue tracking, logging, and progression testing.

We haven't formally asked for any testing automation yet. It's definitely on our radar but, for right now, they've been helping us with manual testing of our written code.

They're seamless and integrate very well with our team. They generally dedicate a design person to us and are involved in all of our Scrums. They're extremely valuable from a production standpoint.

How did you come to work with PQA Testing?

I had worked with PQA at a previous company and was aware of their skill set and capabilities.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

We've spent a few hundred thousand dollars during the course of three to four years.

What is the status of this engagement?

We've been working together for around three years and have two ongoing projects at the moment.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

They integrate into our team very well and perform the formalized QA testing that we need as an agency. We were looking for someone to help us out, and they've been able to provide that. My team loves working with the testers that have been assigned to us and always request the people with whom they've worked in the past.

The overall quality and reliability of our solutions has definitely improved. We've recently launched an e-commerce web app for a client. We only assigned 80 to 100 hours of QA testing for it, but the levels of ticketing and the issues they've been able to find and test through have been extensive. They achieved end-to-end testing on the application.

How did PQA Testing perform from a project management standpoint?

We use Atlassian JIRA, which is our tool of choice. PQA has several testers on our account. They post testing summaries and log how many hours were burned for a given bug resolution.

They share their work hours on a weekly basis in the form of a time report broken down for each team member. The producers on our side use this to obtain a burned hours/burned cost perspective. They're very thorough in regard to the information they provide us.

What distinguishes PQA Testing from other providers?

The individual testers and their delivery and project managers are excellent. Also, the higher-level people with whom we deal are very responsive, reasonable, and informative. They work within our budget, letting us know what they're able to do and make adjustments and customizations to meet our needs, which has ultimately been the reason we've used them as an outsourced department. The people there are very thorough from the ones doing the testing to the ones writing the work orders.

Is there anything PQA Testing could have improved or done differently?

Everything has worked fine so far. They integrate well with our team and they're thorough. I don't have any ideas for improvement.