How is QA effort spread

Let's discuss the following topics:

• How QA effort is split between development and production support
• Reasons for increase of QA effort in the design phase

Split of QA effort between development and production support

Share of QA spend in new development projects (as against enhancements/maintenance projects) has grown from 2012-13 to 2013-14 to 2014-15, from 41% to 46% to 52% respectively.

In 2015-16, the QA spend was split 50:50 between new development and production support.

In 2014-15, for the first time, the QA spend for Development exceeded the QA spend for production support. This is in line with more development projects with organizations undertaking more digital transformation related development work. Refer to the following graph:

Increased QA efforts for new development – point of view

It is evident that when QA is done for new code (as against QA for maintaining/enhancing the existing code), QA effort will be higher.

Organizations are practicing Agile/DevOps to achieve cycle time reduction (faster time to production or achieving time to market objective to gain competitive advantage) and not necessarily with a QA cost reduction objective. If code is released more often and tested in shorter cycles, one will achieve the objective of cycle time, and not necessarily cost reduction.

Continuous integration and continuous deployment are practiced. One can't integrate or deploy less-tested faulty code, so continuous testing means more iterations of testing.

The testers are carrying out executions up until production deployment and in live environment aligning to extreme right. Analysts, such as Forrester and Gartner, recommend not only shift-left to test early in life cycle, but also shift-right to extend tester involvement till deployment.

Increase of QA effort in the design phase

2014-15 WQR report highlighted an increased involvement of QA in high-level design phase to 14% (as against 6% in the previous year).

What is being achieved by QA involvement in the design phase?

Increased QA effort in the design phase – point of view

Shift-left practices are being leveraged to have testers contribute their domain expertise in the design phase.

In line with the trend of continuous testing to support continuous integration and deployment, there is increased automation in silo phases of test design and development (to match the software design phase).

With automated tools supporting test models and test script generation, and their integration with automated test execution, reporting and deployment tools have further pushed the shift left practice to the requirement phase.

This increase of the test effort in the design phase is being debated. It will make testing function costly. However, based on the ROIs, it can be argued that more QA effort spent in the early design phase will reduce manual interventions and reworks in later phases in the life cycle; reducing the cycle time of QA and the cost of testing in turn.