Hi there,
I've been pondering the composition of my team as of late and wanted to try and gather some insights from the larger Dev community. We're currently rolling with a 3:1 dev to QA ratio, something which I feel is waaay too high.
What is your team composition like?
I made a short Survey which I'd love it if you could contribute to, I'll post back the results here if there is enough submissions:
https://aweform.com/view/444075205812289537/dev-to-qa-ratio-survey/
Top comments (5)
I don't see ratio as a good measure. How much work are you pumping out? What level of testing are you after. Do you want your developers to own testing?
If you choose the wrong testing strategy your likely to need more testers than developers as your product grows.
What do you expect from your testers? I could spend full time on a project with zero developers (there were actually 2), because I was spending all my time learning the system to track down some very elusive bugs.
Thanks for your input Jesse.
Yeah, I am starting to think the same thing, maybe the ratio is less interesting, its more about product complexity and the amount of new features/changes delivered that ultimately determine the appropriate number of testers.
Even so, still curious to see what ratios others do have. So far it seems to average out to about the same as we have on my team from the few answers I've gotten.
I answered the survey, but my company's policy is 2:1. New projects sometimes end up 3:1 or 4:1 as people are being shuffled around to accommodate the new project, but the goal is always 2:1. This sucks during downtime but works well when there's a lot of active feature development going on.
Companies that have spun out of mine tend more towards 3:1 to keep QA personnel costs low, which I think is more in line with standards in my city.
Thanks, so that does seem roughly inline what we have going on at the moment then.
As promised all those months ago, here are finally the results:
andershammervald.com/DevToQASurvey...
(that page is dynamic and uses the Aweform API to automatically load the current responses so it should be evergreen)