The SQA2 Blog: General
Most QA vendor renewals get signed on autopilot. You know the vendor, the team is in place, and switching feels expensive. The contract rolls over, and the questions that would tell you something about the next twelve months never get asked.
The standard evaluation measures the wrong thing. Rate, skills, and coverage tell you whether a vendor is good today. They tell you nothing about what happens after the things that always happen, happen. People leave. Teams change. A project suddenly needs more capacity than the vendor planned for. Whether your QA function absorbs those events or gets knocked over by them depends on how the vendor is built, and that almost never shows up on a scorecard.
I wrote recently about why QA continuity is an asset, and an overlooked one. The short version is that the most valuable thing a QA team develops is knowledge of your system, and in most vendor models that knowledge lives in individual people. When they go, it goes, and your team pays to rebuild it.
This post is the practical follow-up. Below are seven questions that measure whether your QA vendor is built for continuity or just staffed for the moment. Answer them honestly about your current vendor. It takes about two minutes.
The QA Vendor Continuity Score
Seven questions about your current QA vendor. Answer honestly. It takes about two minutes.
Your answers are in.
Enter your work email to see your score and what it means for your account. We’ll send you a copy with the breakdown.
Please enter a valid email address.
A copy is on its way to your inbox. These are questions any vendor built for continuity can answer easily. If your score came back low and you want to talk through what’s driving it, reply to that email, or start a conversation.
One more exercise worth running
Take the same idea into a meeting as a scenario. Assume your vendor loses a fifth of its bench over the next six months because people quit or move on:
- Ask which of your releases slip first.
- Ask who picks up what those people knew.
- Ask how long it takes replacements to become productive on your system instead of just assigned to it.
If that discussion produces confident answers, write them down and hold the vendor to them. If it produces silence, you’ve learned something more useful than any reference check would have told you.
None of these questions are “gotchas”. A vendor built for continuity answers all seven easily, because the answers describe how they already operate. If your vendor can’t answer them, better to know that before you sign for another year than after. And if your score came back low and you want to talk through what’s driving it, reply to the results email. That’s what it’s there for.
This is part of our work on QA continuity.
