Project overview
They took over the full portfolio in three weeks and kept our release coverage of the existing suites steady while doing twice the work with the same team.
Head of QA
The client is a large Gulf retail and automotive group running a broad multi-product portfolio. Their testing volumes were rising, and they needed more quality control activities done without the bill rising alongside them. They came to a1qa to move QA ownership across many product streams to one accountable team.
The challenge
The group ran a broad multi-product estate, so any transition had to scale across many streams at the same time rather than one product after another. Testing volumes were climbing.
The core requirement was to lift QA output while maintaining costs at the current level, which meant a change in how the work was owned and run, not simply adding people. On top of that, the handover could not disrupt the existing release suites: their coverage had to stay consistent from the first day of ownership through to steady-state delivery.
Project scope
The group executes releases against established suites, and a1qa formed a single accountable team to own testing across the portfolio, so responsibility sat in one place. a1qa followed a fully managed QA delivery model: rather than staff augmentation on individual products, one team took over the quality assurance work end to end and reported against the client’s release cadence. The group had previously spread testing across separate arrangements, so a first task was pulling those threads into one team with one reporting line back to the Head of QA. The transition was delivered through the following stages:
- Discovery. The team mapped the multi-product estate to understand the range of streams in scope and the existing release suites that had to stay covered. This established the baseline coverage of the existing release suites that the transition had to hold. Additionally, the team catalogued how each stream released, which suites gated each software rollout, and where the manual checks sat, so nothing dropped when ownership changed hands. That baseline became the reference the client measured the transition against.
- Pilot. Ownership was proven out on the release suites first, confirming the team could run the existing tests and keep coverage of those suites steady before the wider handover. Running the pilot against live release cadence, rather than a sandbox, meant the group saw real results before committing the whole portfolio. It also gave the team a working view of the group’s tooling and release rhythm ahead of the full move.
- Stage 3. Full ownership across the portfolio was taken over in three weeks, bringing a wide range of product streams under the single accountable team in parallel rather than sequentially. This is where the multi-product scale of the estate was addressed head-on. Handing every stream over at once, instead of product by product, kept the client from waiting months for the full benefit and avoided a long stretch of split ownership. Each stream carried its existing release suites into the new team without a break in who was accountable for them.
- Stage 4. With ownership in place, the team focused on boosting QA capacity. The same testing team handled a greater volume of release-suite execution while maintaining coverage levels established during Discovery. Test automation carried the extra volume, so it was possible to handle more testing by improving the way work was organized while keeping the team size unchanged. As throughput rose, the team held the Discovery baseline as the floor, so more testing never came at the cost of what the suites already checked.
Across these stages, the work spanned:
- Regression testing on the existing release suites, with coverage maintained through and after the transition.
- Functional testing across the product streams, as ownership moved to a single team.
- Test automation to raise throughput without adding people.
