Project overview
We kept the same test coverage of our release suites and paid less for it.
Head of QA
The client is a US-based life insurance company. They wanted to maintain the same release-suite test coverage while reducing QA spend, so they came to a1qa to take over the work from their prior QA arrangement without letting the standard slip.
Project scope
The client ran an existing release suite testing operation under a prior QA arrangement, and a1qa took ownership of that work rather than building a suite from scratch. Our team was staffed to hold the same test coverage of the release suites with fewer engineers, moving from the prior three-engineer setup to one QA engineer for the same scope. Because the client operates as a US-centered life insurer, the work sat inside a regulated environment where the checks in each release suite had to keep running exactly as before, so nothing about the regulatory posture of a release could shift during a vendor change.
a1qa delivered against a managed team model, taking full ownership of the release suite testing, so the client could step back from day-to-day QA coordination. That meant a1qa owned the planning, execution, and reporting of the release suite checks, and the client’s own QA staff no longer had to coordinate a separate arrangement. Continuity was a priority: the same suites, the same standard, run by a leaner team at a lower cost. The transition of QA ownership was carried out through the following stages:
- Discovery. a1qa reviewed the existing release suites, the prior team’s arrangement, and the regulatory context around a US-located life insurer. This set the baseline for what test coverage of the release suites had to be held through the switch and confirmed the size of the suite being taken on. The team cataloged the regression and functional checks already in place, mapped which suites ran against which releases, and noted where the prior three-engineer setup spent its effort, so the leaner team could cover the same ground.
- Pilot. a1qa ran the existing checks alongside the prior arrangement to prove that one engineer could effectively hold the test coverage of the release suites the earlier three-engineer setup produced. This derisked the switch before full ownership moved across. Running both processes in parallel let us compare results directly and confirm that no checks were missed during the move to a single engineer.
- Phase 3. The transition to full QA ownership was successfully completed. Given the size of the suite and the regulated environment, the switch ran in four weeks, with the test coverage of the release suites held through the handover. During those weeks, a1qa took over the regression and functional testing to confirm the software behaved in line with specifications and no updates introduced new issues, kept the reporting the client relied on, and made sure each software rollout still went live with the same validation process in place.
- Phase 4. a1qa ran the release suite testing under the leaner arrangement, holding the standard the client expected while spending dropped against the prior setup. One QA engineer carried the regression and functional workload for each release, and the client continued to ship on its usual cadence without picking up QA coordination again.
