What Is the Best Ratio Between Testers and Developers?

Sometimes you can meet the following question on specialized IT forums: what is the best ratio between testers and developers?

The answer to this question depends on context.

A good ratio between QA engineers and developers’ teams is determined by point factors.

To give a correct answer, you should think about whether we work with up-to-date tools or with an already developed product, whether all your teammates are skillful and experienced, and what is the expected rhythm of your company’s releases.

You can use various ratios and each one will have either benefits or drawbacks.

Further, we will analyze some examples of them in detail.

Variant 1: 1:1 ratio

A 1:1 ratio is a good variant if a development department has a bad understanding of software testing and QA engineers, in turn, have a bad understanding of development.

The developer-tester tandem can easily work with one another on releasing a new feature and since they are focused on mutual work, they have a high chance to find and fix all possible defects.

But here we can have cases when a developer won’t take part in automated test development and a tester will be the only team member who is able to use this automation properly.

In other words, this means that during future updates of a released feature, a tester becomes some kind of bottleneck who decelerates a general development process.

Variant 2: 2 developers and 1 tester

Such a ratio can be very helpful when front-office developers and back-office developers are working on one feature.

A tester is responsible for front-office/back-office integration testing.

This trio will be experts in the feature — in the same way as the 1:1 variant. But sometimes such a strategy can lead to dissociation when it will be hard to help a new team member.

Variant 3: 2 testers and a group of developers

It’s a very popular case.

A quality assurance team split work according to their skills and workload.

If both testers are collected and skillful, they are usually able to work either on manual testing or automated testing.

They can easily exchange testing features to see if their colleague has not missed a defect.

But such a ratio can lead to bottlenecks when a testing feature requires a lot of testing and one of the testers is not available for some reason.

Variant 4: 1 tester and a group of developers

In this case, a tester becomes in some way a quality assurance instructor.

He/she is no more responsible for all processes of testing and automation.

He/she manages developers’ understanding of what should be simply tested and what should be automated.

In this case, an entire team is responsible for product quality.

If there are no QA engineers, a development department can bridge gaps by developing test plans and checking each other’s work.

And since developers take part in the development and technical maintenance of automated tests, automated testing services are not a bottleneck in such companies.

Conclusion

Each ratio has some benefits and they also have a lot in common.

First, one team member is quite a good tester.

Such skills will help them to search for defects that are hard to find and record them.

Second, you can’t do without professional communication skills.

A development department and testers should always strive to work on software testing regardless of whether this is their responsibility or not.