The handover was fast, and nothing slipped through. Our releases kept shipping while the switch happened.
Head of QA
The client developed a digital games and content marketplace. They needed to change QA vendors because of timing overlaps and quality problems in their previous engagement while ensuring the transition would not disrupt their release cadence.
The client was already shipping software on a regular schedule, which could not be interrupted by a vendor change. The prior relationship had two problems: work timings that overlapped in ways that slowed delivery, and quality issues in the testing itself. Any new setup had to take over the full release testing scope quickly, keep the existing standard of release suite test coverage intact, and ensure that nothing went live untested during the transition. The margin for a quiet drop in release suite coverage was zero.
The client worked to a continuous deployment schedule, so the transition had to fit around live shipping rather than interrupt it. a1qa staffed the engagement to match the outgoing setup, taking on the same release testing scope previously handled by a team of two.
Because the marketplace shipped games and digital content on a rolling basis, any pause in testing would have meant either a stalled release train or a batch of untested builds reaching users, and neither was acceptable to the client.
The delivery model was a full ownership transfer: a1qa absorbed the complete release testing responsibility rather than running a parallel or shadow arrangement. This meant a1qa took direct accountability for every release check from the moment ownership moved, instead of splitting duties with the outgoing setup and leaving room for gaps between the two. The whole process involved the following phases:
Across these phases the goal was continuity, not expansion: the release suites were maintained at their existing functional and regression coverage rather than broadened, so the client kept a predictable, tested go-live flow throughout the change. Keeping scope fixed also made the handover measurable, since the mapped Discovery baseline gave a single reference point to check every later phase against.
