I've just been asked to advise management on organisational quality issues. There seems general agreement that the test labour content across most development projects is around 50% (when people do honest accounting). The central organisational issue, then, is who does that 50% and how do we manage it?

Management are especially eager to learn good answers to the following questions:

  1. What is the best tester to developer ratio?
  2. Who should QA report to?
  3. How skilled should "testers" be? And how do you hire them, keep them, and motivate them?

As detailed in the References section below, I've done a first cut at googling for resources that might help me answer these questions. If you know of other good resources, please let us know.

Here's what we currently do:

  1. We have roughly one tester per ten developers.
  2. QA is part of and reports to Development. Most development project teams have a QA resource from day one in the project.
  3. Most of our "testers" have decent programming skills: they ensure requirements and designs are testable, design test strategies, write test plans, write test automation harnesses, and so on.

How do you do it?

References

In reply to Quality, Developers and Testers: Organisational Issues by eyepopslikeamosquito

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