From the course: Tech on the Go: Building a Software Test Department

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Scaling a test department

Scaling a test department

From the course: Tech on the Go: Building a Software Test Department

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Scaling a test department

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- [Instructor] Scaling a test department. When is the right time to add people to a test engineering team? When people are overwhelmed, dive into the reasons. Is there a disproportionate amount of manual work versus the amount of available time to implement automated test cases? Does every change need to be fully evaluated by a test engineer, including third party package updates with no functional changes, or can an automation pipeline be relied upon? Also, consider the number of people that the test engineer is working with. How many engineers are on the software engineering team compared to test engineers? A ratio I tried to strive for is roughly four software engineers to one test engineer. When it gets closer to eight or 10 to one, that can be lopsided and lead to eventual burnout. Try to avoid committing a single test engineer to multiple distinct teams. For example, what if a single test engineer is part of three…

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