Achieving an expected level of quality with limited resource and budget

Sometimes there is just no money for testing or QA. Testers leave your team and don’t get replaced. The team dwindles, but the developer base either maintains or grows. Your reduced team has more and more to do. The worst case scenario here is that your remaining testers become overworked, can’t do their job properly, get thoroughly de-motivated, and leave, and who could blame them. You now have even less resource.

Despite the scenario above, when it does happen, you will still hear the mantra of “quality is not negotiable”, and probably even more so, requests by product and company leaders to support everything and everyone.

So what is possible? How can you achieve the expected system and product quality with a limited budget?

Looking back at some of the successful projects on which I have been involved, and which have also been struck by similar limited test resource scenarios, it is possible to identify some common characteristics that contributed to their success from both a product and quality perspective.

- a product that the customer really needs
- customer input from the start
- a team that cares about what they are building
- a product manager that knows how to ship products and that trusts in the development team
- a strong work ethic
- innovation throughout the team
- the right tools
- a simple iterative development process

Without going into the psychological aspects of building the right team and processes, most of the above I would weigh as being far more important to foster or implement in a product development team than fretting too much about test and QA resource. Why? Having all the above, for me, goes a long way to ensuring the quality of both the idea and build of your product. Good people, processes, and tools will do far more for you than hammering your application to death, and don’t usually come out of your budget. If you don't have much of the above then life will be difficult.

As a final comment, if you are faced with the scenario described above, you should ask yourself, and maybe the business, the following questions:

- Can we compromise the quality of the system?
- Is quality negotiable for this product?
- Will the customers accept a less than perfect solution?

If the answer is yes to any of these questions then you have the answer as to why you have no  budget, and with this knowledge you can then focus your test and quality efforts in a different and more effective manner.