While a lot of attention is being paid to cost controls in the context of current market trends, the pressure to reduce software testing costs is not something that changes with economic tides. The reality is that even in a bull market, development leaders — pushed by financial expectations and the costly nature of development — are not only being asked to deliver high-quality releases faster than ever, they’re being asked to tighten budgets.

If you feel that internal resources are running low relative to demand, you’re not alone. At the 2022 Women of Silicon Valley conference, speakers touched on the difficulty of acquiring and retaining resources, preparing teams for change, and optimizing software testing on a small budget. At the most basic level, the requirements of the software dev process, from designing, coding, and testing, are enormous.

Software dev and QA have a historically complicated relationship. Engineering teams are sprinting to keep up with the astronomical demand for high-quality software and meet target engineering KPIs. But QA delays releases and adds unexpected debugging assignments to already-busy sprint boards. In the words of one engineer from GitLab’s 2021 developer survey, “testing slows down everything.”

In part one of the “How to better incorporate QA into Agile teams” series, we’re diving into how to improve code development through Agile QA integration prior to feature or product release. The biggest problem for software development teams is getting work done under time constraints. 54% of development teams are struggling to keep up with software delivery. Product teams wanted it yesterday, and devs can’t deliver until tomorrow.

When it comes to introducing and scaling automated testing, QA teams can get quickly overwhelmed trying to figure out what processes to automate first, which tests stand to gain the most ROI, and how automation can work with manual testing strategies. Teams often look to general frameworks, like the test automation pyramid, to dive into building their automated testing strategy.

Pressure to rigorously test software under strict launch times leaves over 54% of software teams struggling to meet demands for new and updated products. But even as the software development lifecycle shifts to incorporate testing, it’s hard to iterate quickly. Developers need a standard two-week cycle to ship code over the wall for QA teams to run with, but how long do QA teams need to release a final report?